US Patent 10108690 Rolling subpartition management

Tables in the database management system may be divided into partitions, and partitions may be further subdivided into subpartitions. Subpartitions may be ordered on time or date values and boundaries between subpartitions may be defined based on various time-based intervals. A subpartition management policy may be defined. Older subpartitions may be automatically deleted, moved to archival storage or moved to a secondary database. Subpartitions may be automatically created and reserved for future use. Preexisting subpartitions may be automatically split and merged into new subpartitions conformant to the subpartition management policy.