db sharding vs partitioning. I am new to SQL and have been trying to optimize the query performances of my microservices to my DB (Oracle SQL). db sharding vs partitioning

 
I am new to SQL and have been trying to optimize the query performances of my microservices to my DB (Oracle SQL)db sharding vs partitioning The reasoning being is because partitioning is just a linear reduction in the amount of data, whereas B-Tree indexes results in a logarithmic reduction in the amount of data to search - which is a much smaller reduction comparatively

They solve (or fail to solve) different problems. Database sharding is also referred to as horizontal partitioning. . Difference between Database Sharding and Partitioning Arpit Bhayani 1y List of Algorithms in Computer Programming Pranam Bhat 2y Data Structures powering our Database Part-2 | Log-Structured Merge. Table A holds items 1–5000 and Table B holds items 5001–10000. The data-based partitioning allows for features that might be impossible to implement with sharded tables. When I try to create a new collection by clicking on the ellipses button on a DB or choose existing DB, it doesn't provide the option to create collection without supplying shard key. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. For example, if you intend on having a /api/users endpoint, you should have users collection and it should contain any and everything you intend to return on that endpoint. Database partitioning is a method for dividing a database into separate sections called partitions. Hybrid Sharding. You can use DocumentDB accounts to. . For. Like partitioning, sharding is also a method to divide off a database to be saved separately. A great thing about Service Fabric is that it places the partitions on different nodes. Sharding vs Partitioning. Starting in PostgreSQL 10, we have declarative partitioning. In graph databases, the distribution process is imaginatively called graph partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 addressed various limitations that existed with the usage of partitioned tables in PostgreSQL, such as the inability to create indexes, row-level triggers, etc. # Example of. Database sharding vs partitioning. Partitioning Azure SQL Database. . 1 Answer. For others, tools and middleware. Sharding makes it easy to generalize our data and allows for cluster computing (distributed computing). Sharding is one specific type of partitioning, part of what is called horizontal partitioning. Content delivery networks are the best examples of this. 131. Sharding and partitioning are techniques to divide and scale large databases. System-managed sharding is a sharding method which does not require the user to specify mapping of data to shards. Choosing a partition key is an important decision that affects your application's performance. Horizontal Partitioning (sharding) stores rows of a table in multiple database clusters. Database partitioning is the act of splitting a database into separate parts, usually for manageability, performance or availability reasons. For hashed sharding: The sharding operation creates empty chunks to cover the entire range of the shard key values and performs an initial chunk distribution. adminCommand ( {. Horizontal partitioning is when the table is split by rows, with different ranges of rows stored on different partitions. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. A single DocumentDB account can contain several databases, and it specifies in which region the databases are created. Sharding -- only if you need to 1000 writes per second. A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding MongoDB Sharding. e. Do đó, “horizontal sharding” và “horizontal partitioning” có thể có nghĩa là cùng một kiến trúc hoặc. Scaling vertically, also called scaling up, means adding capacity to the server that manages your database. Database systems with large data sets or high throughput applications can challenge the capacity of a single server. MongoDB Sharding by foreign key. executor-based partition pruning. The solution : Wouldn't this be a better approach? 1) It shards the data better so I don't need to use starts_with. The advantage of DBMS single server partitioning is that it is relatively simple to set up and manage. Jeremy Holcombe , October 18, 2023. In general less REMOTE / SCATTER -> GATHER pairs means less cluster communication. Sharding Typically, when we think of partitioning, we’re describing the process of breaking a table into smaller, more manageable tables on the same database server. Typically, different sets of tables reside on different databases. As with clustering, there are multiple approaches to sharding, not all of which are called sharding by database administrators. Each shard has the same schema, but holds its own distinct subset of the data. And if you are this far, go to method 2. Sharding is a database partitioning technique being considered by blockchain networks and being tested by Ethereum. Sharding: Partitionning over several server, allowing parallel access (of different datas as opposed to replication) and, as such, memory and cpu load. In the context of scaling MongoDB: replication creates additional copies of the data and allows for automatic failover to another node. Based on my research, I checked that you can do indexing and partitioning to improve query performance, I seem to have known each of the concept and how to do it, but I'm not sure about the difference between both?. I am happy to discuss any of the above in more detail, but only in a more focused context. If you run a multiple core machine with seperate NUMAs, this can also increase performance. If you get this right, database works beautifully. Jeremy Holcombe , October 18, 2023. I have three columns that seem like reasonable candidates for partitioning or indexing: Time (day or week, data spans a 4 month period)4. Like partitioning, sharding is also a method to divide off a database to be saved separately. In the world of databases, two commonly used techniques for managing large amounts of data are database sharding and partitioning. 2) It allows me to use a time-based uuid as the sort key and enable more complex ordering/pagination. Sharding is also a 1% feature. If this is simply a history of what each user likes, then you can probably use database partitioning to partition the data by range on date, and then sub-partition on the user_id. Recently, due to heavy traffic, CPU overload (over 98% utilization) in our database instance. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. The application connects to the shard map manager database to obtain a copy of the shard map. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. The simple approach using a simple hash/modulus to determine the shard looks something like this: 1. In this scenario, we start with 4 databases (DB1 to DB4) and use a hash-based sharding strategy. 2. Data partitioning, also known as data sharding or data segmentation, is the process of dividing a large dataset into smaller, more manageable subsets called partitions or shards. Sharding. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Each shard has the same database schema as the original database. For this month’s PGSQL Phriday #011, Tomasz asked us to think about PostgreSQL partitioning vs. Horizontal partitioning is achieved in a relational database by storing rows from the same table in several database nodes. The main reason to have vertical partition is when there are columns in the table that are updated more often than the rest. We apply a hash function to our data key (e. Shard-Key. This is particularly the case when it comes to heavy write contention, database locking and heavy queries. Yes, it does make sense to shard on a single server. You separate them in another table / partition, and when you are performing updates, you do not update the. Both systems use some form of partition key for partitioning the data. The word shard means "a small part of a whole. Partitioning vs. What is Database Sharding? Sharding, also often called partitioning, involves splitting data up based on keys. Sharding literally breaks a database into little pieces, with each instance only responsible for part of the database. Sharding solves various capacity challenges such as data exceeding the storage capacity of a single database. It's not necessary to understand these. Each partition contains a single copy of the data in the database and functions as a separate database in its own right. In MySQL, the term “partitioning” applies to individual tables of a database. A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding MongoDB Sharding. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, [a] but some appear only in a single shard. See moreThe decision to use sharding or partitioning depends on several factors, including the scale of your application, expected growth, query patterns, and data. For an overview of elastic query, see Elastic query overview. What I would like to confirm is, if partitioning is still needed in the sub-tables (table_001, table_002, etc). Oracle Sharding provides the best features and capabilities of mature RDBMS and NoSQL databases, as described here. A simple hashing function can be the modulus of the key and the number of shards. A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts. An application has the option to choose the partition key that can minimize latency on a range query for a partitioned index. We distribute the data across our databases as follows:A partitioned table is split to multiple physical disks, so accessing rows from different partitions can be done in parallel. 1. Using both means you will shard your data-set across multiple groups of replicas. 4. It involves breaking down a large database into smaller, more manageable pieces called shards. Here's is a figure from MySQL's official documentation on shard key. To handle the high data volumes of time series data that cause the database to slow down over time, you can use sharding and partitioning together, splitting your data in 2 dimensions. 1M rows in a table -- no problem. The hash function can take more than one sharding. sharding vs partitioning vs clustering vs replication. By using separate partition keys for each tenant, you can easily query the data for a single tenant. In this case, the table used for the benchmark has 1. – Bill Karwin. Figure 4:Side-by-side comparison of Schema-based sharding vs. It relies on separating data into logical chunks so that they can be separat. To help customers implement partitioning on these large tables, this 2-part article goes over the details. Partitioning creates separate physical units within the same database in the same server, while sharding distributes data across multiple databases in different server. Partitioning is a rather general concept and can be applied in many contexts. Download Now. See sp_execute _remote for a stored procedure that executes a Transact-SQL statement on a single remote Azure SQL Database or set of databases serving as shards in a horizontal partitioning scheme. It also discusses best practices for partitioning and gives an in-depth view at how horizontal scaling works in Azure Cosmos DB. As I understand, in postgres, db level sharding is mostly done by partitioning the tables and moving each partition into seperate instance like shown bellow. Here the data is divided based on a shard key onto a separate database server instance. Each partition is known as a "shard". Database sharding is a technique used to optimize database performance at scale. Each time-based partition could be a separate distributed table in the. The mongos acts as a query router for client applications, handling both read and write operations. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. If the values for X have a large range, low frequency, and change at a non-monotonic rate,. Splitting your data in 2 dimensions gives you even smaller data and index sizes. Put another way, you Replicate shards; a data-set with no shards is a single 'shard'. Database sharding is a popular approach to scaling out data stores. Replication. 3. The basis for this is in PostgreSQL’s Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) support, which has been a part of the core of PostgreSQL for a long time. But does the partitioning column have anything to do with order on the disk? From Clustered Index Structures:. Sharding is needed if a data set is too large to be stored in a single DB. Horizontal and vertical sharding. function executes a query on the appropriate shard and handles any errors that may occur. A shard is an individual partition that exists on separate database server instance to spread load. , user ID), which yields a range of 0 to 400. The Pros of Database Sharding. NHỮNG CÁCH THỨC PHÂN CHIA DỮ LIỆU. partitioning. Partitioning creates separate physical units within the same database in the same server, while sharding distributes data across multiple databases in different server. In today’s data-driven world, where the volume and complexity of data continue to expand at an unprecedented pace, the need for robust and scalable database solutions has become paramount. Overall, a database is sharded and the data is partitioned. In that context, two words that keep on showing up with regards to databases are sharding and partitioning. Data sharding is the breakdown of data spread across multiple computers, either as horizontal or vertical partitioning. This spreads the workload of. Partitioning is about grouping subsets of data within a single database instance. Sharding is a strategy for scaling out your database by storing partitions of your data across multiple servers instead of putting everything on a single giant one. Sharding on the other hand, and the load balancing of shards, is a storage level concept that is performed automatically by YugabyteDB based on your replication factor. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory, and can be read or written in parallel. 7. The shard catalog also contains the master copy of all duplicated tables in an SDB. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. Sharding is a technique to distribute large amounts of identically structured data across a number of independent databases. Database sharding is the process of breaking up large database tables into smaller chunks called shards. This defeats the purpose of sharding/partitioning. The idea is to implement partitions as foreign tables and have other PostgreSQL clusters act as shards and hold a subset of the data. Sharding is a database scaling technique based on horizontal partitioning of data across multiple independent physical databases. Because xa transaction and partitioning is supported, it can do decentralized arrangement to two or more servers of data of same table. MongoDB is a modern, document-based database that supports both of these. On the other hand, data partitioning is when the database is. Sharding is partitioning where the database is split across multiple smaller databases to improve performance and reading time. However, in some use cases it can make sense to partition your database tables where parts of the table are distributed on different servers. 131. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss two methods for splitting databases into parts to manage them efficiently: sharding and partitioning. Partitioning vs Sharding vs Scale-out. Replication, or Replica Sets in MongoDB parlance, is how MongoDB achieves high availability, Replica Sets are a Primary, and 0 to n amount of secondaries which have read-only copies of the. By default, the operation creates 2 chunks per shard and migrates across the cluster. You can definitely implement database sharding with MySQL very effectively. Database sharding is a type of horizontal partitioning that splits large databases into smaller components, which are faster and easier to manage. With it, there is dedicated syntax to create range and list *partitioned* tables and their partitions. country key to separate the data into shards. Particularly number 2 as Postgresql is notoriously. Sharding is a good option for handling a situation like this. Hash-based Partitioning. There are two types of Sharding: Horizontal Sharding: Each new table has the same schema as the big table. Distributed. Sharding is needed if a data set is too large to be stored in a single DB. This article explores when to use each – or even to combine them for data-intensive applications. For example, in an ecommerce application, you might have one database node serving product catalog data, and another database node capturing and processing orders. However, Sharding a. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. as Cassandra is column oriented DB. Partitioning -- won't help the use case you described. In this case, the table used for the benchmark has 1. Some popular ways in SQL Server to partition data are database sharding, partitioned views and table partitioning. Database sharding is a powerful tool for optimizing the performance and scalability of a database. 🔹 Shorten response time. What is Sharding or Data Partitioning? Sharding (also known as Data Partitioning) is the process of splitting a large dataset into many small partitions which are placed on different machines. Option is right there in the portal when provisioning a new collection. Divide the data store into horizontal partitions or shards. However, to take full advantage of sharding, the application needs to be fully aware of it. Each database server in the above architecture is called a Shard while the data is said to be partitioned. PDF RSS. 1 (hopefully we’re switching to EJB 3 some day). Horizontal partitioning and sharding. This initial. Splitting your database out into shards can help reduce the load on your database, leading to improved performance. In comparison, when using range-based sharding. The main difference is that partitioning groups these subsets on a single database instance, whereas sharded data can be spread across multiple. The declaration includes the partitioning method as described above, plus a list of columns or expressions to be used as the partition key. Thus, each shard operates as an independent database, consistent with its own schema, indexes, and data subsets. See other posts by Luka. Method 2: yes, the reason for having a background process break/merge/load balancing them. Driver I can not find anyway to specify partitionkeys in my queries. Key Takeaways. Next steps. Sharding is a specific type of partitioning in which dat. Horizontal sharding refers to taking a single MySQL database and partitioning the data across several database servers, each with an identical schema. To illustrate, let’s say you have a database that stores information about all the products. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Ta có 3 cách thức Sharding dữ liệu như sau: Horizontal sharding. MongoDB uses the shard key associated to the collection to partition the data into chunks owned by a specific shard. ”. 6 GB of data for 2019 (until June in this one). It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Edit: Your interviewer is also wrong. Cassandra is NOT a column oriented database. The correct way to scale writes is sharding as you gave. Load balancing/Chunk Migration — Mongo manages an equal distribution of data across shards by migrating the chunks, so as to unleash the power of distributed computing. Most Citus setups I have seen primarily use Citus sharding, and not Postgres table partitioning. This depends on the Multi-Datacenter feature of replication. The technique divides the data into buckets using some type of hash key such as a date and/or a natural key. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the relevant terms and definitions behind sharding and partitioning in YugabyteDB and show you how to use both correctly. Sharded vs. There are many methods to break a large dataset into shards. the "employee id" here. . What is your take on Sharding. For me this was one of the most confusing aspects of learning this stuff because they are often used interchangeably and there is a certain amount of overlap between the terms. 1. partitioning. In this case, the records for stores with store IDs under 2000 are placed in one shard. Sharding vs partitioning: What is the difference? Some may confuse partitioning with sharding. Database normalization ensures data efficiency by eliminating redundancy and ensuring. Conclusion. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. These settings specify the default sharding parameters for newly created databases. If you are using mongoDB as a backend for a REST interface, the best practice is to create on collection per resource. Shard-Query is an OLAP based sharding solution for MySQL. What is Sharding? Sharding is a database architecture pattern related to horizontal partitioning — the practice of separating one table’s rows into multiple different tables, known as partitions. You put different rows into different tables, the structure of the original table stays the same in the new. Round-robin Partitioning. The data in all of the shards put together represent the original complete database. g for large database that cannot fit on a single disk. – Kain0_0. Benefits 🔹 Facilitate horizontal scaling. Partitioning could be a different database inside MySQL on the same server, or different tables, or even by column value in a singular table. See more on the basics of sharding here. I am trying to grasp the different concepts of Database Partitioning and this is what I understood of it: Horizontal Partitioning/Sharding : Splitting a table into different table that will contain a subset of the rows that were in the initial table (an example that I have seen a lot if splitting a Users table by Continent, like a sub table for. partitioning. When you partition a table in MySQL, the table is split up into several logical units known as partitions, which are stored separately on disk. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. Sharding database allows efficient scaling and managing of massive databases. In a key- or hashed -based sharding architecture, a database application uses a shard key to locate a shard. It is essential to choose a sharding key that balances the load and distributes the data. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. For hashed sharding: The sharding operation creates empty chunks to cover the entire range of the shard key values and performs an initial chunk distribution. Without sharding, the database is limited to vertical scaling alone, which is beneficial but limited. UserIDs that are even would be on shard 0 and odd userIDs would be on shard 1. Range-based Partitioning. Sharding, at its core, is a horizontal partitioning technique. Replication duplicates the data-set. A shard is an individual partition that exists on separate database server instance to spread load. 8. Database sharding is the optimization of large databases by splitting data from a larger database table into multiple smaller tables (shards). In general, it is best to prototype in InnoDB, grow the dataset until. The replication strategy determines where replicas are stored in the cluster. Partitioning, also called Sharding, is a fundamental consideration in NoSQL database. This is not a new challenge; organizations have faced it for years, and horizontal sharding is one of the key patterns for solving it. Each partition of data is called a shard. I know that it is really hard to provide generic answer and things depend on factors like. Sharding là một mẫu kiến trúc cơ sở dữ liệu liên quan đến phân vùng ngang - thực tế tách một hàng bảng Bảng thành nhiều bảng khác nhau, được gọi là partitions. In this video, we dive into the topic of Database Sharding vs Partitioning and break down the key differences between the two. If your sharding scheme is simple it can be done in your application layer, but if its more complex you may want to use a tool. 4 Answers. A lot of the options are described on our site here, as well as the advanced options we support. A simple way to shard the data is -. g. 3) I will consume much less capacity on queries since it won't have to go through items I don't need. Each partition has the same schema and columns, but also entirely different rows. PartitioningData partitioning can be done horizontally or vertically, while sharding is usually done horizontally. Partitioning and sharding are two common ways to improve performance, manageability, and availability of larger databases. Now let us discuss each partitioning in detail that is as follows: 1. For a horizontal partitioning (sharding) tutorial, see Getting started with elastic query for horizontal partitioning (sharding). Once connected, create two new databases that will act as our data shards. In the third method, to determine the shard number. Horizontal partitioning is often referred as Database Sharding. (By default, it is set to 1, on the assumption that per-user dbs will be quite small and. A shard is a horizontal data partition that holds a portion of the complete data set and is thus in the responsibility of serving a portion of the overall demand. Sharding is a way to split data in a distributed database system. sharding allows for horizontal scaling of data writes by partitioning data across. sharding in PostgreSQL. Later in the example, we will use a collection of books. First of all try to optimize the database/queries (can be combined with vertical scaling - by using more powerful server for the database) Enable replication (if not already) and use secondary instances for read queries; Use partitioning and/or shardingMake sure you're interview-ready with Exponent's system design interview prep course: the basics of database sharding and partitio. 어떻게 보면 샤딩은 수평 파티셔닝의 일종이다. On the other hand, data partitioning is when the database is. For example, high query rates can exhaust the CPU. Ví dụ ta có bảng dữ liệu thông tin về người dùng, ta sẽ dựa trên location của người dùng để quyết. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, as for load balancing. Each partition is a separate data store, but all of them have the same schema. It is a way of splitting data into smaller pieces so that data can be efficiently accessed and managed. The items in a container are divided into distinct subsets called logical partitions. . Each chunk has inclusive lower and exclusive upper limits based on the shard key. By. Distributed. Replication adds fault tolerance to a system. This month’s PGSQL Phriday invitation from Tomasz Gintowt is on the topic of “Partitioning vs sharding in PostgreSQL“. Later in the example, we will use a collection of books. SQL Server 2008 introduced a table partitioning wizard in SQL Server Management Studio. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. If [couch_peruser] q is set, that value is used for per-user databases. Sharding is a very important concept that helps the system to keep data in different resources according to the sharding process. I position SQL partitioning here because it divides tables, thereby placing it at a higher level than the previously discussed row distribution but at a lower level than database sharding. I thought this might make. 8. What is Database Sharding? Database sharding is a horizontal partitioning of data in a database. Database Sharding and Database Partitioning are similar in that they both divide a larger database into smaller parts, but the way they handle and distribute data differs. Figure 1 is an example of a sharding database. A sharding key that has only 50 possible values, is considered low cardinality, while one that might be able to express several million values might be considered a high cardinality key. If you are using mongoDB as a backend for a REST interface, the best practice is to create on collection per resource. Replication may help with horizontal scaling of reads if you are OK to read data that potentially isn't the latest. We already planned to go for "sharding", so we'll have multiple mysql instances, in which there are multiple databases, and in each database there are multiple tables like 'table_001', 'table_002', etc. A simple hashing function can be the modulus of the key and the number of shards. Database partitioning vs. This article will help you understand what Database Sharding is and how MySQL Sharding works. The following topics describe the physical organization of a sharded database: Sharding as Distributed Partitioning. 28. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory,. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. Sharding là một mẫu kiến trúc cơ sở dữ liệu liên quan đến phân vùng ngang - thực tế tách một hàng bảng Bảng thành nhiều bảng khác nhau, được gọi là partitions. Both sharding and partitioning mean distributing data into smaller and. A sharding key is an attribute or column that determines how the data is distributed among the shards. sharding allows for horizontal scaling of data writes by partitioning data across. You are conflating MongoDB replication (where secondaries contain a full copy of the data for redundancy) with sharding (partitioning of a logical database across a cluster of machines). Overview. Sharding is usually a case of horizontal partitioning. Horizontal Partitioning. Sharding Scenario: Adding a Database in a Hash-based Sharding Strategy. Some databases have out-of-the-box support for sharding. Consistent hash sharding is better for scalability and preventing hot spots, while range sharding is better for range based queries. We apply a hash function to our data key (e. Partitions can co-exist on a single machine, whereas shards. 2. To horizontally partition our example table, we might place the first 500 rows on the first partition and the rest of the rows on the second, like so:We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Choosing a partition key is an important decision that affects your application's performance. Horizontal partitioning splits a table by rows, based on a partition key or a range of values. A big graph is partitioned into multiple small graphs, and the storage and computation of each small graph are stored on different servers. Stores possessing IDs of 2001 and greater go in the other. Whereas, in network sharding, the entire blockchain network is partitioned into sub-networks called shards. Problem. Sharding -- only if you need to 1000 writes per second. Each partition (also called a shard) contains a subset of data. Partitioning -- won't help the use case you described. Database sharding and partitioning are two similar concepts that refer to dividing a database into smaller parts or chunks in order to improve its performance and scalability. All the. For example, if you intend on having a /api/users endpoint, you should have users collection and it should contain any and everything you intend to return on that endpoint. For maintenance, these large single databases have to be backed up daily while the amount of actual changing data might be small. Horizontal partitioning, also known as row partitioning or sharding, is the process of splitting a table into multiple smaller tables based on a partition key, such as a customer ID, a date range. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. SQL partitioning proves beneficial in managing smaller tables, yet for enhanced scalability in SQL processing, it necessitates integration with either. Database Sharding and Database Partitioning are similar in that they both divide a larger database into smaller parts, but the way they handle and distribute data differs. A sharded database is a single logical Oracle Database that is horizontally partitioned across a pool of physical Oracle Databases (shards) that share no hardware or software. partitioning. The main difference. The. Consistent hashing is a technique widely used in load balancing and routing service. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, or for load balancing. Since version 10, a huge leap was made with. Compared with the partitioning problem in. This is a topic near and dear to me and I’m excited to think about it some this month. Sharding, at its core, is a horizontal partitioning technique. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. Sharding involves saving the partitioned data onto other computers and storage facilities. It can be either a single indexed column or multiple columns denoted by a value that determines the data division between the shards. Sharding is the spreading of horizontal partitions across multiple servers. When it considers the partitioning of relational data, it usually refers to decomposing your tables either row-wise (horizontally) or column-wise (vertically). cloud. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory, and can be read or written in parallel. Sharding vs. Both methods aim to improve performance and scalability, but they differ in how they handle data distribution. 16. Whether you're sharding by a granular uuid, or by something higher in your model hierarchy like customer id, the approach of hashing your shard key before you leverage it remains the same. Think of each partition like being a different file - and opening 365 files might be slower than having a huge one.