Dividing a database table or dataset into smaller, more manageable pieces based on specific criteria like date ranges or geographic regions. Like organizing a large library by splitting books into different rooms based on subject.
An e-commerce platform partitions its orders table by month, so queries for recent orders only scan the current month's partition instead of billions of historical records.
Partitioning is a database/data-lake feature rather than a standalone service. Each cloud offers it through managed databases/warehouses (native table partitioning) and query engines over object storage (partitioned files and partitioned table metadata).