F table deletion - partitions

Question

Hi there
Vi have an InfoCube which load data wery often (a few records every 5 minutes). This has resulet in a very large number of partitions on the F table (around 25000) which is killing us when doing database statistics.
I copied all data to another InfoCube which now contain all the data. However when trying to delete the data in the origianl cube it does a truncate action in the oracle database, which does not remove the partitions. Is there a way to do this?
Is it possible to delete the table using SE11 and transport it again from development?
Chris

Answer 1

Not sure how much overhead the SAP Drop Empty Partition pgm adds to the database process of dropping the partitions.  The only thing I can think of would be to get the list of empty partitions (imagine they must get it from DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS) and put together your own SQL to drop the partitions or perhaps multiple stmts that could be run in parallel.
Never thrilled about running something outside of the SAP environment, because you can never be 100% sure they don't update something somewhere.  Haven't really lloked at teh SAP Drop pgm to see what else it might be doing besides a partition drop.
Don't know if the partition drop time could be improved if the partitions were not buffered. The DB must take some time to make sure that there are no rows in the buffer that it must worry about.  Also, have DB statistics been updated since the deletion?  If they haven't been, the DB may not realize the partitions are not empty, which then forces it to check the buffer before dropping.  A good DBA might be able to tell you if the partition drop process is affected by either stats that don't reflect that the partition is empty or buffering. I just don't know for sure.