Multiattribute hashing and its variations have been proposed for partial match and range queries in the past the main ideal is that each record yields a bit-string (record signature) according to the values of its attributes the binary value of this string decides the bucket that the record is stored in this paper we propose to use gray codes instead of binary codes in order to map record signatures to buckets in gray codes successive codewords differ in the value of exactly one bit position thus successive buckets hold records with similar record signatures the proposed method achieves better clustering of similar records and avoids some of the (expensive) random disk accesses, replacing them with sequential ones we develop a mathematical model derive formulas giving the average performance of both methods and show that the proposed method achieves 0%-50% relative saving over the binary codes we also discuss how gray codes could be applied to some retrieval methods designed for range queries such as grid file[ Nievergelt84a] and the approach based on the so called z-ordering [Orientein84a].