beyond the pail

[Dave Wilton]

> Bucket is also used, or used to be, as a technical term for a
> DBMS software feature.  I'm far enough away from that now,
> about 15 years, that I don't remember what the term meant
> specifically, but it had to do with temporary storage capacity
> during sorts and reconfigurations.  I wonder whether the
> choice of bucket over pail in this case had an industrial
> connection or might have been related to the provenance of
> the programmers who came up with the term.

Possibly influenced by the alliterative "bit bucket," computer-speak for the
mystical place that lost data vanishes into. There is an even older term
"bit box," which has the alliteration but not the "bucket."