Partition (database)

A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts.

[1] Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability[2] reasons, or for load balancing.

This increases performance for sites that have regular transactions involving certain views of data, whilst maintaining availability and security.

While implementations vary between transactional and analytical workloads, the core principles of partitioning remain consistent across both use cases.

Each record belongs to one partition but may exist on multiple nodes for fault tolerance.

In leader-follower replication systems, nodes can simultaneously serve as leaders for some partitions and followers for others.

[1] Partitioning aims to distribute data and query load evenly across nodes.