READ-ONLY partitions and Dump and Load

Let me first state that in the current plan, "read only" partitions will not be making the 11.4.0 release.  The intent is to schedule it for a followup release.  With that said, please realize that the following is only my current thinking on this and can certainly change prior to being released.

The way to make backup avoid copying of "read only" partitions is via "incremental backup" as opposed to backup being specifically aware of the state of the partition.  There is nothing special about it.  A full backup will backup the "read only" data.   A full restore will overwrite the "read only" data.   The "incremental backups" will not contain the read only partition.  This is what is required anyway.  If your entire database is gone, you need to restore all the data, even the missing read only data, from some backup.  If your last backup did not contain the read only data you would need to find the most recent backup that had it.  Then apply the subsequent backups to get the rest of the data.  Being able to enable/disable the "read only" status between backups also complicates matters if the backup were to look at the partition state.  It would become a nightmare to know which backup files were required to restore an entire database.

So looking at the requirements of avoiding the backup of read only partitions, incremental backup fits the bill quite nicely and the restore process is very well defined.

To your question about db changes:

1. Most schema changes like adding new fields will have no effect on the read only data since the new field missing in existing records will assume the default value.
2. Performing a dump has no affect either since it is a read only operation.
3. Performing a load will fail if it need to write data to the "read only" partition