clustered

1. 1
   adjective

   Arranged together in a tight group or bunch.

   Like a handful of stars packed into one corner of the night sky.

   The clustered houses on the hillside shared a single narrow road.

   Microscope images revealed clustered cells along the edge of the tissue.

   Similargrouped, bunched, huddled, clumped, packed

   Oppositescattered, dispersed, isolated

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of cluster.

   Fans clustered near the stage hours before the concert began.

   The committee has clustered the proposals into three broad groups.

   Note

   The verb works in both directions: fans clustered near a stage on their own, while a committee clustered its proposals into groups. A third pattern takes with and means strewn with clusters, as in a hillside clustered with cottages. Before a noun, as in W. B. Maxwell's "the clustered lights" in The Mirror and the Lamp (1918), the participle shades into the adjective for things grouped together.

3. 3
   adjective

   Describing a database index whose key determines the physical order in which a table's rows are stored.

   Like a filing cabinet where the folders themselves sit in alphabetical order, not just an index card pointing to them.

   They rebuilt the table with a clustered index on the customer ID.

   Because the primary key was clustered, range queries ran much faster.

   Oppositenonclustered

   Note

   In database work the adjective attaches to two things: the index itself and the key that drives it. One builds a clustered index, but one can also say a primary key is clustered. Because the data pages are sorted by that key, the leaf level of the index holds the actual rows rather than pointers to them. That is why queries over a range of key values tend to run faster.

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