Blocking locks encountered while splitting partitions in 11g

Question

Background: I've taken over administration of a database that has several date-range partitioned tables that, suffering from a lack of proper administration, have not had their MAXVALUE partition split into the requisite monthly partitions, in almost a year. As a result, in some cases the MAXVALUE partition has 10 million rows (the monthly partitions should average 750K rows).
My understanding is that the syntax I am using to perform the split, should allow for on-line access to the tables while the split is being performed. Here is my syntax without the actual table names:
ALTER TABLE owner.table_name
SPLIT PARTITION MAXVALUE AT
(TO_DATE(' 2012-02-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN'))
INTO (PARTITION PART201201
TABLESPACE tablespace
PCTFREE 10
INITRANS 1
MAXTRANS 255,
PARTITION MAXVALUE) update indexes;
Problem: In attempting to split the MAXVALUE partition into monthly partitions while the database is on-line and accessible, I see application sessions being blocked by my split session.
So, is my understanding above incorrect? Is there some additional syntax that I am missing? Or, are the blocking locks I'm seeing merely transient in nature, and can be ignored? The server I'm running on is not very "beefy", and the split is taking quite a while to run.
Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

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Background: I've taken over administration of a database that has several date-range partitioned tables that, suffering from a lack of proper administration, have not had their MAXVALUE partition split into the requisite monthly partitions, in almost a year. As a result, in some cases the MAXVALUE partition has 10 million rows (the monthly partitions should average 750K rows).
My understanding is that the syntax I am using to perform the split, should allow for on-line access to the tables while the split is being performed.
Problem: In attempting to split the MAXVALUE partition into monthly partitions while the database is on-line and accessible, I see application sessions being blocked by my split session.
So, is my understanding above incorrect? Is there some additional syntax that I am missing? Or, are the blocking locks I'm seeing merely transient in nature, and can be ignored? The server I'm running on is not very "beefy", and the split is taking quite a while to run.
>
DML that modifies the table cannot be performed on the table while the split is ongoing.
Your bigger problem is that you are using the WRONG method for your use case. If you repeatedly split the MAXVALUE partition you will be repeatedly copying and moving the same ultimate MAXVALUE data over and over again.
DBMS_REDEFINITION is one of your options. But since I just answered this same question 3 days ago see my reply in this thread for a more thorough discussion of your options.
Re: Which is the Best method to Split Partition