Patent ID: 7792819

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a query for execution in each of a plurality of data partitions of a partitioned data source, wherein each data partition contains a different subset of the data, and wherein each data partition contains at least some different data relative to the other data partitions of the data source; determining query execution times of the query for each of the plurality of data partitions of the data source; based on the determined query execution times and for one or more data partitions other than the data partition with the longest query execution time, postponing execution of the query in each of the respective one or more data partitions to a respective extent such that results from executing the query in the respective one or more data partitions are received closer to a time query results are received from the data partition with the longest query execution time; wherein postponing execution of the query comprises adjusting a priority of the query in at least one of the data partitions to allow one or more tasks other than the query to execute prior to execution of the query in the at least one of the data partitions; and executing the query in each of the plurality of data partitions of the data source.