Oracle 10g Logical Standby - Can you partition the tables differently from the Master DB?

Question

I have a master database that is used for OLTP type applications. At the moment we have individual table replication for many tables to another database that is used as a reporting instance.

Soon, we are moving to a Data Guard Logical Standby database. What I cannot seem to track down from google is whether I can change the physical structure of the tables on the logical standby.

I would like to partition many of the large tables on the logical standby to make reporting easier - the ideal way to do this would be to partition the tables on the logical standby and then the SQL apply process can just update the tables as normal, but I cannot figure out if that is supported.

Does anyone know if it is possible to alter the table structure on the standby to implement partitioning?

Answer 1

This should be possible. I would enable row movement on the logical standby partitioned tables in case your OLTP application updates the values of the partitioning key.

Since you are using the logical standby as a reporting database, why not leave the "copies" of the OLTP tables as-is and create materialized views around them? - you might pick up additional performance improvements from denormalization and aggregation. It is not necessarily the case that you will see performance improvements as a result of just partitioning the tables.