METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ACHIEVING UNIFORM DATA DISTRIBUTION IN A PARALLEL DATABASE SYSTEM

The invention provides a method and apparatus for distributing data of a table substantially uniformly across a parallel database system having a plurality of interlinked database nodes. Data of the table is distributed across a group of nodes (nodegroup) in accordance with a partitioning arrangement. Resource loading, for example, the workload or storage volume of the nodes is monitored. Data is moved from one or more nodes having higher resource loading to nodes having lower resource loading to achieve a substantially uniform distribution of the resource loading across the group of nodes concerned. In the course of moving data the selection of groups of data to be moved is performed in a manner to reduce the amount of data movement.