How to effectively manage large table which is rapidly growing

Question

All,
My environment is single node database with regular file system.
Oracle - 10.2.0.4.0
IBM - AIX
A tablespace in this database is growing rapidly. Especially a single table in that tablespace having "Long Raw" column datatype has grown from 4 GBs to 900 GBs in 6 months.
We had discussion with application team and they mentioned that due to acquisitions, data volume is increased and we are expecting it to grow up to 4 TBs in next 2 years.
In order to effectively manage the table and to avoid performance issues, we are looking for different options as below.
1) Table is having date column. With that thought of converting to partitioned table like "Range" partitioning. I never converted a table of 900 GBs to a partitioned table. Is it a best method?
     a) how can I move the data from regular table to partitioned table. I looked into google, but not able to find good method for converting to regular table to partitioned table. Can you help me out / share best practices?
2) In one of the article, I read, BLOB is better than "Long RAW" datatype, how easy is to convert from "Long RAW" datatype. Will BLOB yield better performance and uses disk space effectively?
3) Application team is having purging activity based on application logic. We thought of using shrinking of tables option with enable row movement- "alter table <table name> shrink space cascade". But it is returning the error that table contains "Long" datatype. Any suggestions.
Any other methods / suggestions to handle this situation effectively..
Note: By end of 2010, we have plans of moving to RAC with ASM.
Thanks

Answer 1

To answer your question 2:
2) In one of the article, I read, BLOB is better than "Long RAW" datatype,
how easy is to convert from "Long RAW" datatype. Will BLOB yield better
performance and uses disk space effectively?Yes, LOBs, BLOBs, or CLOBs are (supposed) to be better than raws (or long raws). In addition, I believe Oracle has or will shortly be desupporting the use of long raws in favor of LOBs, CLOBs, or BLOBs (as appropriate).
There is a function called "to_lob" that you have to use to convert. Its a pain because you have to create the second table and then insert into the second table from the first table using the 'to_lob' function.
from my notes...
=================================================
Manually recreate the original table...
Next, recreate (based on describe of the table), except using CLOB instead of LONG:
SQL> create table SPACER_STATEMENTS
2 (OWNER_NAME VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL,
3 FOLDER VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL,
4 SCRIPT_ID VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL,
5 STATEMENT_ID NUMBER(8) NOT NULL,
6 STATEMENT_DESC VARCHAR2(25),
7 STATEMENT_TYPE VARCHAR2(10),
8 SCRIPT_STATEMENT CLOB,
9 ERROR VARCHAR2(1000),
10 NUMBER_OF_ROWS NUMBER,
11 END_DATE DATE
12 )
13 TABLESPACE SYSTEM
14 ;
Table created.
Try to insert the data using select from original table...
SQL> insert into SPACER_STATEMENTS select * from SPACER_STATEMENTS_ORIG;
insert into SPACER_STATEMENTS select * from SPACER_STATEMENTS_ORIG
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00997: illegal use of LONG datatype
That didn't work...
Now, lets use TO_LOB
SQL> insert into SPACER_STATEMENTS
2 (OWNER_NAME, FOLDER, SCRIPT_ID, STATEMENT_ID, STATEMENT_DESC, STATEMENT_TYPE, SCRIPT_STATEMENT, ERROR, NUMBER_OF_ROWS, END_DATE)
3 select OWNER_NAME, FOLDER, SCRIPT_ID, STATEMENT_ID, STATEMENT_DESC, STATEMENT_TYPE, TO_LOB(SCRIPT_STATEMENT), ERROR, NUMBER_OF_ROWS, END_DATE
4 from SPACER_STATEMENTS_ORIG;
10 rows created.
works well...
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