jargon

Data engineering·Cost, layout and query performance

the rows are stored in date order, so a range query reads a contiguous run of blocks instead of touching all of them.

Sort key

Also calledsortkey, ordering column

The column or columns a table's rows are physically ordered by. Sorting improves both skipping and compression, since adjacent similar values compress far better, so it often reduces bytes scanned twice over. Choosing more than two or three sort columns rarely helps, because ordering is lexicographic and the later columns only discriminate within already-narrow ranges.

Commonly confused with