Patent US 7,926,045

A mechanism is provided for adaptively assigning of a plurality of data management application instances to a plurality of data objects. The mechanism determines a processing load for a plurality of data management application instances for performing a data management task based on history data being descriptive of the data objects which have been affected by previous data management tasks, each of the data management application instances being assigned to at least one sub-section of a tree being descriptive of a storage structure of the data objects by means of a set of separation points for each one of the data management application instances. The mechanism adapts the separation points in the tree for balancing the expected processing loads of the data management application instances for a future data management processing task.