Data Partitioning

Definition

Data Partitioning is the technique of distributing data across multiple tables, disks, or sites in order to improve query processing performance or increase database manageability. Query processing performance can be improved in one of two ways. First, depending on how the data is partitioned, in some cases it can be determined a priori that a partition does not have to be accessed to process the query. Second, when data is partitioned across multiple disks or sites, I/O parallelism and in some cases query parallelism can be attained as different partitions can be accessed in parallel. Data partitioning improves database manageability by optionally allowing backup or recovery operations to be done on partition subsets rather than on the complete database, and can facilitate loading operations into rolling windows of historical data by allowing individual partitions to be added or dropped in a single operation, leaving other data untouched.

Key Points

There are two dominant...