A method and system for accessing and display of data records from large data sets. The method includes defining a plurality of boundaries to logically partition the large data set into a plurality of buckets in accordance with a predefined sort order. The sort order is based on data stored in at least two columns of a database table in which at least a base portion of each data record is stored. In response to a request to retrieve a data record or group of related records, such as all contacts having a given first and last name, a determination is made to which bucket the data record or at least a portion of group of related records are stored in. A query is then formulated to retrieve a subset of the large set of records from the database corresponding to data records contained in the bucket.