Benefit of limiting partitions

[cgswong]

Are there any benefits to limiting the number of partitions in a partitioned table to 12 (one per month) versus letting the table have say 36 partitions (still one per month for 3 years)? Each month partition would have say 70 million rows and queries would sometimes go across partitions. In the former case I'd have three tables with 12 partitions each, while the lattter would have one table with 36 partitions.

Thanks. The ONE ( HP-UX + Solaris + AIX + Tru64 = Unix)