Copying data into a partitioned table

Question

Chaps,
We have a bunch of data tables that we are partitioning to improve performance. I am trying to find the best way to copy the data from the old tables into the partitioned ones.
For example, one take has about 45million rows. Performing a query on the entire table (one column is a timestamp) between two times takes about 6 minutes. I tried to do:
INSERT INTO NEWTABLE (SELECT * FROM OLDTABLE)
But its taking ages and when I checked on the progress in Enterprise Management Console I saw that it was performing a full table scan and ended up taking over 45 minutes! We have 2 more tables of this size and 2 others that are 5 times as large, so if I can make this go faster it would be brilliant!
I'm pretty sure that exporting the old table using 'exp' and then importing into the new partitioned table using 'imp' will not respect the partitioning?
So can anyone think of a quicker method that this?
Many thanks in advance,
Simon

Answer 1

1. Target table : alter table nologging
2. Target table : set indexes unusable
3. ALTER SESSION SET SKIP_UNUSABLE_INDEXES = TRUE
4. INSERT /*+ APPEND */ INTO TBL_TARGET SELECT * FROM TBL_SOURCE
4a. Hint /*+ PARALLEL */ will be probably also the option - it depends ...
5 Target table REBUILD INDEXES (probably with separate jobs for every partition).
6. ALTER TABLE LOGGING