Key Range Partitioning
Summary: A partitioning strategy where a continuous range of keys (from some minimum to some maximum) is assigned to each partition.
Sources: chapter6
Last updated: 2026-04-15
In this approach, partitions own all keys between their boundaries. If you know the boundaries, you can easily determine which partition contains a given key. (source: chapter6)
Characteristics
- Sorting: Keys within each partition are typically kept in sorted order (e.g., using sstables or lsm-trees).
- Range Queries: Very efficient because related keys are likely to be in the same partition. (source: chapter6)
- Risk of hot-spots: Certain access patterns can lead to hot spots. For example, if keys are timestamps, all writes for a given time period will hit the same partition. (source: chapter6)
Systems Using This
- Bigtable, HBase, RethinkDB, and MongoDB (before version 2.4). (source: chapter6)