A partition is a 'section' of the database used to control the size & number of objects (quotas), versioning, expiration, archiving etc.

The basic purpose is to group folders together, and to apply on that group, through the parent partition, a set of maintenance rules.

An object can belong to at most one partition. The 'belonging' can be either direct: the object type contains a partition reference attribute; or indirect: the object type contains a reference to another object type that contains a direct partition reference.

The base folder object type includes an optional 'partitionRef' attribute that references the partition the folder belongs to. This means that folders belong to partitions directly, and that all folder object types (images, stories etc) belong to a partition indirectly via their folder.

The partition object contains the attributes; count, totalSize, totalAuxSize and totalExtSize which are automatically set by the system with the total number of objects and sizes of all the objects belonging (directly or indirectly) to the partition.

Partitions can be associated with a quota, setting in this way the maximum number of objects and/or the maximum sizes for the objects belonging to the partition. These limits must be set using a quota, that is, it is not possible to define values for MaxSize, MaxTotalSize, etc. directly. Rather, this is done indirectly using a defined quota set.

See also

Quotas

Object size

Defining a size attribute