The generated procedure will handle the creation of new partitions as required. Any data for periods prior to the first partition is placed in the first partition. If data is received for a period after the last partition then new partitions are created. Empty partitions are created if necessary to skip periods where no data is present. For example, if we have a table partitioned by month and the latest partition is 200204 (april/2002). If data is then received for say september 2002 the update procedure will build partitions for may, june, july, august and september. There is a variable at the start of the update procedure called v_max_skip_periods. This variable is by default set to 12. This defines the maximum number of continuous partitions we will leave empty. From our previous example if our latest partition was april 2002 and we received data for july 2003 with no interim data then the update procedure will fail as it would have to skip 14 partitions. This check is present to prevent erroneous data from creating hundreds of partitions into the future.

In QAD Data Warehouse Designer a partitioned fact table can only be created from an existing fact table. The process therefore is to create a fact table normally, including the update procedure and indexes. The table type is then changed to a partitioned table type and QAD Data Warehouse Designer will assist in creating the exchange table, modifying the indexes and building the procedure to handle the update of the partitions.