Patent ID: 8719310

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium accessible by a computer program system being executed on a data processing and storage system that has multiple concurrent users, comprising: a structured data table distributed across at least two nodes including a first node and a second node, the structured data table comprising at least two non-uniform rows, including at least a first row and a second row, each of the at least two non-uniform rows including a first key, a second key, and non-uniform columns including a plurality of name/value pair elements, wherein the first key comprises a partition key that is used in determining which of the at least two nodes stores each of the at least two non-uniform rows such that each of the at least two non-uniform rows having an identical partition key are stored in the same one of the at least two nodes, wherein the partition key consists of one of a plurality of unique identifiers associated with a respective one of the users, each of the unique identifiers corresponds one-to-one with a corresponding one of the users, and each of the user identifiers is globally unique for the corresponding user across the computer program system, and wherein the computer program system comprises a postage processing system and each of the users purchases postage using the computer program system, the data processing and storage system is a Cloud Computing system, at least two of the at least two non-uniform rows comprise a different number of columns, at least two of the at least two non-uniform rows comprise a column each having a different type of name/value pair, and the unique identifier associated with one of the users comprises a customer number.