Partitioning

The process of splitting a large table into smaller individual tables. Doing this allows a query to access only a fraction of the data, scanning less data and therefore return results more much quickly.

Vertical Partitioning

A special case of partitioning where different columns are put into different tables. Each of these sub-tables contain a primary key to the main table.

Vertical partitioning can be helpful in the following use cases:

• When the query retrieves many columns in a table that is very wide or BLOB columns
• Different columns need to exist on different storage environments / devices
• Different IAM requirements for certain columns containing sensitive data (e.g. passwords)