The foregoing needs and other needs are addressed by the present invention, which
provides, in one aspect, a mechanism for locating a data object. According to an
aspect of the present invention, key values for data objects are generated, each
key value may contain a first subkey value and a second subkey value. A mapping
associates the first subkey values with storage locations. A particular first subkey
value is mapped to storage location that contains second subkeys of a set of key
values that correspond to the first subkey value. The storage location also includes
additional information that may be used to locate objects associated with the set
of key values.
