Partitionare

Partitionare is the act of dividing a whole into parts that meet certain rules. In Romanian, it denotes the general process of partitioning. In mathematics, a partition of a set S is a collection of nonempty, pairwise disjoint subsets whose union is S. For example, the set {1,2,3,4} can be partitioned as {{1,2},{3,4}}. Partitions correspond to equivalence relations on S: two elements are related if they lie in the same block. The study of partitions leads to Stirling numbers of the second kind and Bell numbers.

Computing and data management use partitioning to improve performance, scalability, and security. In databases, horizontal partitioning splits a table by rows; vertical partitioning splits by columns. Partitioning can reduce query latency and improve maintenance. In memory management, partitioning allocates address space or cache; in distributed systems, data is partitioned across nodes (sharding).

In disk storage, disk partitioning divides a storage device into independent regions with separate file systems; commonly used to organize data, enable dual-booting, or isolate systems.

Other applications include geographic or administrative partitioning (dividing a region into zones), graph partitioning (dividing a graph into blocks with minimal inter-block connections), and time-series segmentation (partitioning data into intervals).

Notes: Partition algorithms include Kernighan-Lin, spectral partitioning, and more general partition refinement. The term partitionare is widely used in Romanian technical texts and is often translated as partitioning in English.