US Patent 11397729 Systems and methods for pruning external data

Disclosed herein are systems and methods for pruning external data. In an embodiment, a database platform receives a query directed at least in part to external data in an external table on an external data storage platform. The external table includes partitions that correspond to storage locations in a source directory of the external data storage platform. The storage locations contain files that contain the external data. The database platform identifies, from external-table metadata that is stored by the database platform and that maps the partitions of the external table to the storage locations in the source directory, a subset of the partitions as including data that potentially satisfies the query. The database platform identifies data that satisfies the query by scanning the identified subset of the partitions, and responds to the query at least in part with the identified data that satisfies the query.