Patent ID: 8290987

Claim:
A method, comprising: storing, in data structure maintained in a computational device, how many control areas splits have occurred to store a data set, wherein each control area split causes an addition of a single new control area; receiving, a command to add a new data record to the data set; determining, whether adding the new data record to the data set will result in a threshold for control area splits to be exceeded; and in response to determining that adding the new data record to the data set will result in the threshold for control area splits to be exceeded, creating at least two new control areas in addition to continuing to use one existing control area for storing the data set, wherein the one existing control area has an existing plurality of control intervals allocated to the one existing control area, the method further comprising: creating a new control interval; splitting each of the existing plurality of control intervals and the newly created control interval to generate a new plurality of control intervals; and distributing the new plurality of control intervals among the at least two new control areas and the one existing control area, wherein each of the new plurality of control areas has at least some empty space.