Technologies for forming logical indexes and utilizing such indexes so as to abstract many of the complexities resulting from referencing partitioned database tables. Included are technologies for making use of order-preserving properties of table metadata, for adding a partition equality predicate to an explicit predicate in merge-join processing on partitioned tables, and for selecting execution of a logical skip scan on a partitioned table when a query predicate does not reference a specific partition. Such technologies generally abstract from the query writer and processing systems explicit referencing of table partitions.