My colleague Deepak Arora (see his blog here) has written an excellent white paper on purging old instance data from SOA Suite/BPEL 10g and also a great blog post on automating the deletion of old partitions. If you are interested in this topic, I encourage you to check them out!
The A-Team Chronicles
Our other publications
Building a Custom BPM Worklist, Oracle InSync 2011 User Group presentation
Performance Tuning for Oracle Business Process Management Suite 10g, Oracle Whitepaper, July 2011
Performance Tuning for Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g, Oracle Whitepaper, February 2013
Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics, Packt Publishing, September 2012
Fusion Middleware 12.1.2: Developing Applications with Continuous Integration
Fusion Middleware 12.1.3: Developing Applications with Continuous Integration
RedStack 