Partitions – Each Table can have one or more partition keys which determine how the data is stored, for example a table T with a date partition column ds had files with data for a particular date stored in the /ds= directory in HDFS. Partitions allow the system to prune data to be inspected based on query predicates, for example a query that is interested in rows from T that satisfy the predicate T.ds = '2008-09-01' would only have to look at files in /ds=2008-09-01/ directory in HDFS