A Comparison of Two Database Partitioning Approaches that Support Taxonomy-Based Query Answering

In this paper we address the topic of identification of cohorts of similar patients in a database of electronic health records. We follow the conjecture that retrieval of similar patients can be supported by an underlying distributed database design. Hence we propose a fragmentation based on partitioning the health records and present a benchmark of two implementation variants in comparison to an off-the-shelf data distribution approach provided by Apache Ignite. While our main use case in this paper is cohort identification, our approach has advantages for taxonomy-based query answering in other (non-medical) domains.