Patent ID: 8812545

Claim:
A system comprising: a memory comprising one or more top-level categories, each top-level category including a subset of the items; a category group including at least one of the top-level categories and the subset of the items belonging to at least one of the top-level categories, items corresponding to a given top-level category being split among a plurality of category groups; and a server comprising a database engine coupled to the memory, the database engine configured to provide a listing of top-level categories, to determine a top-level category corresponding to an item, to determine a category group corresponding to the top-level category, and to assign the top-level category and the category group to the corresponding item, to partition the top-level category by dividing items within a single top-level category into two or more category groups, and to partition a database in the memory by category group into multiple database instances of the database across multiple storage devices, each storage device configured to store groups of items related by category group.