Partition Exchange permits to exchange partition between tables.
After the EXCHANGE PARTITION command is executed, the partition is empty and you can drop it
The data does not physically move from the partition to the new table. This exchange partition statement merely updates the data dictionary to reset a pointer from the partition to the table and vice versa. Because there is no physical movement of data, this exchange does not generate redo and undo, making it faster and far less likely to impact performance than traditional data-movement approaches such as INSERT.
create table trans_y05q1 as
select * from trans
where 1=2;
This creates an empty unpartitioned table TRANS_Y05Q1, whose structure is identical to that of TRANS. The 1=2 clause returns false, so no rows of the TRANS table are transferred.
alter table trans
EXCHANGE partition y05q1
with table trans_y05q1;
This operation makes the data inside the Y05Q1 partition appear inside the TRANS_Y05Q1 table and empties the partition.
After the EXCHANGE PARTITION command is executed, the partition is empty and you can drop it.