Patent ID: 8458214

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; and at least one other category group, the at least one other category group including a remainder of the top-level categories, wherein items corresponding to a given top-level category are 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, 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 comprising groups of items related by category group, the database engine further configured to receive a record of the item to be added to a database in the memory, to generate an item number for the item, the item number comprising an automatically generated number and a category group identifier corresponding to the category group of the item, the category group identifier appended to the automatically generated number, and to generate an item information object corresponding to the item number in the database.