Overview

The idea is simple and powerful: divide data into ranges so that the database can make intelligent decisions at processing time on what segments of the data to completely ignore or completely focus on. For example, by dividing data by date ranges (January data over here, February data over there, etc.) the database can completely focus on the ranges that are specific to incoming queries. This is another clear variant of a nonrecursive divide-and-conquer strategy, and the operational details will be discussed below.

Range partitioning has become such a ubiquitous notion in database design that we had a hard time tracing back its origins a bit like trying to discover who invented the sailboat. To find out where the idea came from we contacted one of the world s leading database researchers, David DeWitt. DeWitt is the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Science at the University of Madison at Wisconsin, author of over 100 technical papers, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and was named a Fellow of the AC in 1995. According to DeWitt, a graduate student named Bob Epstein as part of his thesis proposed the idea of range partitioning for distributing tuples of tables among different nodes of a distributed database system (distributed Ingres). DeWitt was the first to apply this idea to parallel database systems as part of the Gamma project. The paper on Gammma [DeWitt 1986] published at the 1986 VLDB conference...