• distribute tuples evenly amongst buckets
• have most buckets nearly full   (attempt to minimise wasted space)

Best case: every bucket contains same number of tuples.

Worst case: every tuple hashes to same bucket.

Average case: some buckets have more tuples than others.

Use overflow pages to handle "overfull" buckets  (cf. sorted files)

All tuples in each bucket must have same hash value.