COLUMNS Partitioning Region Cities 2 Vimmerby, Hultsfred, Västervik 3 Nässjö, Eksjö, Vetlanda 4 Uppvidinge, Alvesta, Växjo With  LIST COLUMNS  partitioning, you can create a table for customer data that assigns a row to any of 4 partitions corresponding to these regions based on the name of the city where a customer resides, as shown here: CREATE TABLE customers_1 ( first_name VARCHAR(25), last_name VARCHAR(25), street_1 VARCHAR(30), street_2 VARCHAR(30), city VARCHAR(15), renewal DATE ) PARTITION BY LIST COLUMNS(city) ( PARTITION pRegion_1 VALUES IN(’Oskarshamn’, ’Högsby’, ’Mönsterås’), PARTITION pRegion_2 VALUES IN(’Vimmerby’, ’Hultsfred’, ’Västervik’), PARTITION pRegion_3 VALUES IN(’Nässjö’, ’Eksjö’, ’Vetlanda’), PARTITION pRegion_4 VALUES IN(’Uppvidinge’, ’Alvesta’, ’Växjo’) ); As with partitioning by  RANGE COLUMNS , you do not need to use expressions in the  COLUMNS()  clause to convert column values into integers. (In fact, the use of expressions other than column names is not permitted with  COLUMNS() .) It is also possible to use  DATE  and  DATETIME  columns, as shown in the following example that uses the same name and columns as the  customers_1  table shown previously, but employs  LIST COLUMNS partitioning based on the  renewal  column to store rows in one of 4 partitions depending on the week in February 2010 the customer’s account is scheduled to renew: CREATE TABLE customers_2 ( first_name VARCHAR(25), last_name VARCHAR(25), street_1 VARCHAR(30), street_2 VARCHAR(30), city VARCHAR(15), renewal DATE ) PARTITION BY LIST COLUMNS(renewal) ( PARTITION pWeek_1 VALUES IN(’2010-02-01’, ’2010-02-02’, ’2010-02-03’, ’2010-02-04’, ’2010-02-05’, ’2010-02-06’, ’2010-02-07’), PARTITION pWeek_2 VALUES IN(’2010-02-08’, ’2010-02-09’, ’2010-02-10’, ’2010-02-11’, ’2010-02-12’, ’2010-02-13’, ’2010-02-14’), PARTITION pWeek_3 VALUES IN(’2010-02-15’, ’2010-02-16’, ’2010-02-17’, ’2010-02-18’, ’2010-02-19’, ’2010-02-20’, ’2010-02-21’), PARTITION pWeek_4 VALUES IN(’2010-02-22’, ’2010-02-23’, ’2010-02-24’, ’2010-02-25’, ’2010-02-26’, ’2010-02-27’, ’2010-02-28’) ); This works, but becomes cumbersome to define and maintain if the number of dates involved grows very large; in such cases, it is usually more practical to employ  RANGE  or  RANGE COLUMNS  partitioning instead. In this case, since the column we wish to use as the partitioning key is a  DATE  column, we use  RANGE COLUMNS  partitioning, as shown here: CREATE TABLE customers_3 ( first_name VARCHAR(25), last_name VARCHAR(25), street_1 VARCHAR(30), 4674