# Namespaces

**URL:** <https://discuss.aerospike.com/t/namespaces/1797>\
**Category:** Aerospike Terminology\
**Created:** [September 9, 2015, 6:47pm UTC](https://discuss.aerospike.com/t/namespaces/1797 "2015-09-09T18:47:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nOOb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5e9695/32.png) [@nOOb](https://discuss.aerospike.com/u/nOOb)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2015, 6:47pm UTC](https://discuss.aerospike.com/t/namespaces/1797/1 "2015-09-09T18:47:53Z")

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A namespace can actually be a part of a database or it can be a group of databases as you would think of them in a standard RDBMS – the reason you collect data into a namespace relates to how the data is going to be stored and managed

Can you explain in detail the difference between a namespace and a Database. and how does namespace relates to Partitions.Does one partition means one namespaces . And if this is so how can one limit partitions to 4096

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**Author:** ![Mnemaudsyne](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/discuss.aerospike.com/mnemaudsyne/32/200_2.png) [@Mnemaudsyne](https://discuss.aerospike.com/u/Mnemaudsyne)\
**Post date:** [September 11, 2015, 12:28am UTC](https://discuss.aerospike.com/t/namespaces/1797/2 "2015-09-11T00:28:58Z")

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@rishibit,

A namespace is the top-level container for data. You can think of a namespace as an area of storage related to the media. It can be either RAM or Flash (SSD-based). A namespace in Aerospike/NoSQL terminology is analogous to a database in the RDBMS world.

Each namespace is divided into 4096 partitions; the partitions are divided equally among the nodes in the cluster. That means that if there are n nodes in the cluster, each node stores ~1/n of the data.

I hope this helps. You can read more about Aerospike’s Data Distribution [here](https://www.aerospike.com/docs/architecture/data-distribution.html).