Sharding

Also known as: Shard

Horizontal partition of data in a database (like blockchain) or search engine.

A database shard is a horizontal partition of data in a database (like blockchain) or search engine. Each individual partition is referred to as a shard or database shard. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, but some appears only in a single shard. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset of data. There are numerous advantages to the horizontal partitioning approach. Since the tables are divided and distributed into multiple servers, the total number of rows in each table in each database is reduced. This reduces index size, which generally improves search performance.