Damage Control

Maintaining your existing service level agreements (SLA) with your users becomes increasingly challenging as your E-Business Suite database grows.  The knee-jerk reaction to a performance problem is often to throw more hardware at it. If you have a large E-Business Suite environment where the growth rate of your historical transactional data is starting to affect performance, there's another alternative to scaling up your hardware. It's possible that you could use database partitioning to squeeze some additional performance out of your existing environment without the added expense of new hardware.
http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2009/04/whitepaper_update_database_partitioning_for_ebusin.html