List partitioning enables you to explicitly control how rows map to partitions by specifying a list of discrete values for the partitioning key in the description for each partition. The advantage of list partitioning is that you can group and organize unordered and unrelated sets of data in a natural way. For a table with a region column as the partitioning key, the East Sales Region partition might contain values New York, Virginia, and Florida.
The DEFAULT partition enables you to avoid specifying all possible values for a list-partitioned table by using a default partition, so that all rows that do not map to any other partition do not generate an error.