> How many partitions do you expect to have? Why are you partitioning on that column? Do you have need to drop old data all at the same time? How many rows in each partition or in total do you expect to have? In my case there is a hierarchy so the partitions are based on certain parts of the hierarchy. For example. There is an item 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 The partition is based on 1.2 (a function based hash scheme). I could fine tune the number of partitions simply by writing my function. Each item has certain attributes that I want to index. For example all items have an expiry_date. I will be archiving the items when they expire but of course all those items will not be in the same partition. In fact it's highly probable all partitions will have to be visited in order to accomplish this task. Unfortunately I will not be able to drop an entire partition and I can't partition by expiry date because access is most often by the item number. Also of course the expiry date can change over the lifetime of the item.