Partitioned database objects provide partition independence. This characteristic of partition independence can be an important part of a high-availability strategy. For example, if one partition of a partitioned table is unavailable, then all of the other partitions of the table remain online and available. The application can continue to execute queries and transactions against the available partitions for the table, and these database operations can run successfully, provided they do not need to access the unavailable partition.
The database administrator can specify that each partition be stored in a separate tablespace; the most common scenario is having these tablespaces stored on different storage tiers. Storing different partitions in different tablespaces enables you to do backup and recovery operations on each individual partition, independent of the other partitions in the table. Thus allowing the active parts of the database to be made available sooner so access to the system can continue, while the inactive data is still being restored. Moreover, partitioning can reduce scheduled downtime. The performance gains provided by partitioning may enable you to complete maintenance operations on large database objects in relatively small batch windows.