US Patent 10268726 Partition key management for improved throughput

Systems and methods are provided to implement a client system that distributes accesses to database object in a database across different partitions of the database object. The client specifies a partition key and a sort key for the database object, so that data items in the database object are partitioned based on the partition key and sorted in each partition based on the sort key. The client determines a set of partition key values based on a throughput criteria of the database object and a per-partition throughput limit. To insert a data item into the database object, the client assigns a partition key value from the set to the data item using an assignment function, configured to distribute accesses to the database object across its partitions to balance usage of the partitions. To obtain sorted data from the database object, the client issues queries to obtain results for each partition key value, and then merges the results to produce a fully sorted result set.