Kellyn Gorman

7 August 2025

Flyway and Optimized Partition Management for Oracle Databases

I’m pleased to announce that Flyway continues to improve its support for Oracle databases with every release, focusing on performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. The most recent updates to Flyway Desktop and Flyway CLI specifically target a long-standing challenge for Oracle users: unnecessary table rebuilds when migrating to partitions or when managing partitions.

This post highlights the changes in the latest version, new behaviors, and upcoming features that will benefit teams working with Oracle partitioned tables.

Enhancements to Oracle List Partition Management

Partitioned tables in Oracle are widely used to improve performance and manageability, particularly for large datasets. For any table that is implementing partitioning, Flyway now assumes the table is quite large and demanding as part of the database workload. With this expectation taken into consideration, our latest development enhancements are geared towards the challenges customers face when managing partitioned objects. As part of DDL changes on partitions, we now offer the ability to avoiding the trigger of full table rebuilds, which could result in extended deployment times and unnecessary overhead.

The latest Flyway updates reduce the rebuild operations when managing Oracle list partitions. Flyway does this in the following three ways:

1. Dropping List Partitions Without Triggering Rebuilds

• Introduced in Flyway CLI in the latest release
• Previously, even a simple DROP PARTITION caused Oracle to rebuild the table during migrations.
• Now, if you only drop a partition (without adding or altering others), Flyway prevents a rebuild, saving significant time.

2. Adding List Partitions Without Triggering Rebuilds

• Introduced in Flyway CLI in the latest release
• Adding new list partitions to an Oracle table was used to trigger an unnecessary rebuild.
• With this update, adding partitions no longer causes a rebuild when no other partition operations are involved.

3. Altering Partition Properties Without Triggering Rebuilds

• Enhanced in Flyway CLI
• Certain partition property changes in Oracle previously resulted in full table rebuilds.
• Now, Flyway intelligently determines whether a rebuild is required and skips it when the alteration is safe.

Coming Soon: Faster Rebuilds with CTAS

While these improvements avoid rebuilds whenever possible, some Oracle operations still require a table rebuild. To optimize these unavoidable cases, the Flyway team is developing CTAS (CREATE TABLE AS SELECT)-based rebuild strategies.

This upcoming feature will significantly reduce the time required for rebuilds, minimizing downtime and improving the overall migration experience.

For Oracle environments where partitioned tables are common, such as data warehouses and high-throughput transactional systems, these enhancements offer immediate benefits with the following:

• Shorter deployment windows during releases
• Lower impact on production performance
• Faster migrations in test and CI/CD pipelines

The latest releases of Flyway Desktop and Flyway CLI deliver smarter handling of Oracle list partitions, reducing unnecessary rebuilds and paving the way for even faster migrations with future CTAS optimizations.

With ongoing product enhancements, Flyway will officially drop support for Oracle 11g, tentatively in September 2025. Given Oracle’s current release of 23ai, this change isn’t unexpected. However, because Redgate puts customers at the center of everything we do, we recognize that some may still rely on this long-standing and well-loved version.

If you have Oracle in your environment, upgrade now to Flyway Desktop 8.3.0 and Flyway CLI 11.10.2 to take advantage of these improvements and streamline your Oracle database migrations.

Do you manage large Oracle partitioned tables? Share your challenges and successes with these updates in the comments!