Difference between partitioning and fragmentation I'm trying to learn something about distributed databases and I stumbled upon the concepts of fragmentation and partitioning. It seems to me as if both do the same thing and produce similar results (deviding a relation horizontally/vertically/both).

So what's the difference between fragmentation and partitioning?
The terminology depends on the RDBMS. In SQL server: Partitioning is a DB feature that can be used to improve performance and/or manageability of your DB. 

Fragmentation happens when your rows in the data pages are non-contiguous due to insert/delete operations. Your DB performance will decrease if you have high fragmentation of your data.