This follows on from the suggestion I made - taken along the lines of the subject "auto creation of partitions" where I suggested the syntax of partition check(month of mydatecol) and have a new partition created as data was entered. With this scenario dropping the partition when it was empty would complement the creation of a new partition as needed.
Given that there seems to be no real support of going with "auto maintenance" were new partitions are added as needed, then the auto dropping of empty partitions would also not apply.
Leaving us with only specific add partition / drop partition commands. And have the parent table pick up rows not matching any partition check criteria.
I was thinking along the lines of what Jim had suggested earlier regarding overflow partition. Instead of dumping unmatched rows to the master table, we could put them into a default "DUMP/DUMB" partition.
Given that Simon wants to do away with having the master table APPENDed in the planning phase, this would be better.