Glossary / Partitioning

Partitioning

Practical PostgreSQL glossary entry with a clear definition, example, and benchmarking context.

What Is Partitioning?

Partitioning splits large tables into smaller pieces called partitions. PostgreSQL supports declarative partitioning since version 10, improving performance and manageability for big data sets.

Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance

In PostgreSQL performance work, Partitioning affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.

Practical Benchmarking Context

When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Partitioning changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.

Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.

Example

Method: RANGE, LIST, or HASH partitions using CREATE TABLE ... PARTITION BY

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