You must maintain a partitioned table using the ALTER TABLE command against the top-level parent table. The most common scenario is dropping old partitions and adding new ones in order to maintain a rolling window of data in a range partition design. You may also want to convert (exchange) older partitions to the append-only compressed storage format in order to save space. If you have a default partition in your partition design, the procedure for adding a new partition is to split the default partition.