PARTITIONING OWNERSHIP OF A DATABASE AMONG DIFFERENT DATABASE SERVERS TO CONTROL ACCESS TO THE DATABASE

At least a portion of a database (250) is partioned into ownership groups (230, 232, 234, 236) that are each assigned one or more database servers (20 8, 210, 212) as owners. The database servers (208, 210, 212) assigned as owners (s208, s210, s121) are treated as the owners of all data items in the ownership group. That is, they are allowed to directly access the data items within the ownership group, while other database servers are not allowed to directly access those data items. A database system includes one or more presistent storage devices (214, 216) having a database (250) stored thereon , and a plurality of database servers (208, 210, 212) executing on a plurality of nodes (202, 204, 206) that directly access the persistent storage devices (214,216). At least a portion of the database (250) is partitioned into a plurality of ownership groups (230, 232, 234, 236) that are each assigned an owner set. Only process executing on database servers that belong to an owne r set are allowed to directly access data within the ownership group.