ABSTRACT
The Basics of Sharding Technology
Simply, a shard is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each shard is held on separate database server instance, to spread load. Sharding involves splitting and distributing one logical data sets across multiple servers. To achieve sharding, the rows or columns of a larger database table are split into multiple smaller tables.
Although sharding and partitioning both break up a large database into smaller databases, there is a difference between the two methods. After a database is sharded, the data in the new table is spread across multiple systems, but with partitioning, that is not the case. Partitioning groups data subsets within a single database instance.
It is worth noting that sharding is not the only available scalability technology. Additionally, a commitment to implementing sharding doesn’t mean a rejection of other emerging technologies.