2) Excellant example of dbms_redefinition here

http://www.orafaq.com/articles/archives/2003_08.htm

I have actually done this a few time on a production system with live tables and it works

3) The select would have an overhead in doing the select against multiple tables but if it has some indexed criteria it should reduce this overhead. To insert into the view you would probably need an INSTEAD OF trigger to choose which table to insert into but this would have a performance overhead.

4) the only drawback with real partitioning is the price

5) standard is just as reliable as enterprise BUT enterprise has nice features like online index rebuilds which help in increasing availability. There is a doc in technet somewhere which lists exactly what standard lacks.

Alan