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Data & Analytics · Advanced

Hot Partition

A partition or shard that receives a disproportionate share of traffic, creating a bottleneck while others sit idle.

Definition

Hotspots come from skewed keys, such as a single popular customer, or sequential keys. In Bigtable and Spanner, sequential row keys such as timestamps cause hotspots, which is why key salting, hashing or field reordering is recommended.

Example

Using a timestamp as the leading Bigtable row key concentrates all writes on one node.

Exam tip

For Bigtable and Spanner, don't start keys with timestamps or sequential IDs.

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