A question appeared recently in a comment on a blog note I wrote about the new (in 12c) deferred global index maintenance that allowed the execution of a drop partition to return very quickly. The question was in two parts:
- Why is an exchange partition so slow by comparison?
- Is there any way to make it quick?
It occurred to me that it might be possible to do something for some cases by taking advantage of the partial indexing feature that also appeared in 12c. It wouldn’r eliminate the need for index maintenance, of course, and you clearly couldn’t avoid the insert maintenance for the incoming partition completely … but you might be able to ensure that it happens only at a time you find convenient.
There’s a little more detail in my reply to the comment, but this note is a place holder for the article I’ll write if I ever find time to test the idea.
Oracle Scratchpad 
Comments and related questions are welcome.