Partition

Our goal with partitioning is to spread the data and the query load evenly aross nodes. If every node takes a fair share, then--in theory-- 10 nodes should be able to handle 10 times as much data and 10 times the read and write throughput of a single node

If the partitioning is unfair, so that some partitions have more data or queries than others, we call it skewed. The presence of skew makes partitioning much less effective. In an extreme case, all the load could end up on one partition. A partition with disproportionately high load is called a hot spot.

The simplest approach for avoiding hot spots would be to assign records to nodes randomly.