Partitioning Strategy Advisor

When to Use

You are designing or evaluating a distributed database where data must be spread across multiple nodes (sharding) and need to select a partitioning key, a partitioning method, secondary index approach, rebalancing configuration, and request routing topology.

This skill applies when the partitioning scheme is open (new system), problematic (existing system with hotspots or unsupported query patterns), or needs documented justification (architecture decision record, team alignment). It produces a concrete recommendation covering partition key choice, range vs. hash vs. compound method, secondary index strategy, rebalancing approach, and routing topology.

Prerequisite check:

• If you haven't selected a data model (relational, document, graph) for your system, run data-model-selector first — partitioning key design depends on the schema and access patterns that the data model determines.
• If you are also designing replication across nodes, run replication-strategy-selector after this skill — partitioning and replication are largely independent choices, but the replication factor affects partition sizing.
• If you need to diagnose hotspots or routing failures in a live production system, use distributed-failure-analyzer for root-cause analysis after using this skill to select the corrected strategy.

Context & Input Gathering

Required Context (must have — ask if missing)