Db sharding vs partitioning. Row-based sharding. Db sharding vs partitioning

 
 Row-based shardingDb sharding vs partitioning <samp>Starting in PostgreSQL 10, we have declarative partitioning</samp>

Now let us discuss each partitioning in detail that is as follows: 1. If you run a multiple core machine with seperate NUMAs, this can also increase performance. A great thing about Service Fabric is that it places the partitions on different nodes. The hash function can take more than one sharding key. 1 Horizontal partitioning — also known as sharding. Database sharding is a technique used to distribute the data in a database across multiple servers, or shards, in order to improve scalability and performance. The most basic example would be sharding by userID across 2 shards. If the values for X have a large range, low frequency, and change at a non-monotonic rate,. Conclusion. Jeremy Holcombe , October 18, 2023. Option is right there in the portal when provisioning a new collection. Lastly maybe consider a NoSQL option (highly doubt you need to do this) If you have not done at least 3/5 options I mentioned you probably should not do sharding and look at the alternatives. Version 10 of PostgreSQL added the declarative table partitioning feature. Each time-based partition could be a separate distributed table in the. . Key Takeaways. If the index is also partitioned by the index keys on sourceairport and destinationairport, then the query will only need to read. In this article, we will explore the. Partitions, Tablespaces, and Chunks. As I understand the strategy Cosmos DB use is partitioning with partition keys, but since we use the MongoDB. g. Download Now. Oracle Sharding builds on the generic sharding concept and extends it to offer an enterprise-grade distributed database solution that can handle massive amounts of data with ease. Consider a table that store the daily minimum and maximum temperatures. Round-robin Partitioning. Azure's best practices on data partitioning says: All databases are created in the context of a DocumentDB account. A good partition strategy should avoid Hot. Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. This will be used for sharding too. This initial. You put different rows into different tables, the structure of the original table stays the same in the new. User IDs 1 and 3 are in shard 1, User IDs 2 and 4 are in shard 2. 3. 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. A database can be split vertically — storing different tables & columns in a separate database or horizontally — storing rows of a same table in multiple database nodes. Sharding is any time you split your large database into smaller pieces to limit full table scans during runtime. Sharding -- only if you need to 1000 writes per second. Can have up to 4000 partitions, whereas a query using date sharded tables can only query up to 1000 tables at once. Consistent hash sharding is better for scalability and preventing hot spots, while range sharding is better for range based queries. Key-based Partitioning. Sharding is a method of partitioning data to distribute the computational and storage workload, which helps in achieving hyperscale computing. To illustrate, let’s say you have a database that stores information about all the products. e. A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding MongoDB Sharding. 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. System Design for Beginners: Design for Experienced Engineers: a member fo. It is the mechanism to partition a table across one or more foreign servers. While the declarative partitioning feature allows users to partition tables into multiple partitioned tables living on the same database server, sharding allows tables. Sharding distributes data across multiple servers, while partitioning splits tables within one server. So you would need to go back and rewrite all the database accessing code to pick the right server to talk to for each query. sharding. Sharding Architecture. For example, in an ecommerce application, you might have one database node serving product catalog data, and another database node capturing and processing orders. It seems to me a bit like Sharding to Oracle RAC is like SQL Server partitioning is to Oracle Partitioning. Why Hazelcast. When those objects sync, the partition value becomes a field in the MongoDB documents. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. Partitioning is about grouping subsets of data within a single database instance. (As mentioned before, a partition is a set of replicas ). The idea is to implement partitions as foreign tables and have other PostgreSQL clusters act as shards and hold a subset of the data. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of “partitioning vs. Sharding database is feasible with the use of both SQL as well as NoSQL databases. Creating multiple servers will release a server from one another's locks. Figure 1 - Horizontally partitioning (sharding) data based on a partition key. Sharding is a database. With Oracle Sharding, data is automatically distributed across multiple nodes, while still allowing the application to treat the database as a single instance. you are leveraging database sharding. It is a way of splitting data into smaller pieces so that data can be efficiently accessed and managed. Sharding is the equivalent of “horizontal partitioning. Horizontal Partitioning (sharding) stores rows of a table in multiple database clusters. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory, and can be read or written in parallel. adminCommand ( {. MongoDB uses the shard key associated to the collection to partition the data into chunks owned by a specific shard. 3. Allow lighter joins. Each partition is created based on the partitioning key. 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. The guidelines for participating are as follows: Publish your blog post about “ partitioning vs sharding ” by Friday, August 4th, 2023. . This defeats the purpose of sharding/partitioning. In the context of scaling MongoDB: replication creates additional copies of the data and allows for automatic failover to another node. It’s important to note. Sharding solves various capacity challenges such as data exceeding the storage capacity of a single database. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. Each partition has the same schema and columns, but also entirely different rows. Mỗi partitions có cùng schema và cột, nhưng cũng có các hàng hoàn toàn khác nhau. Sharding is one specific type of. By increasing the processing power, memory allocation, or storage capacity, you can increase the performance and volume that a database system can handle without increasing. Database sharding is a technique used to optimize database performance at scale. Additionally,. Pros and Cons of Database Sharding. Sharding is a partitioning pattern for the NoSQL age. Sharding on a Single Field Hashed Index. Hybrid Sharding. Splitting your database out into shards can help reduce the load on your database, leading to improved performance. But these terms are used for different architectural concepts. 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. “Data is distributed across multiple servers using partitioning, and each partition is further replicated to provide availability. Partitioning is the idea of splitting something large into smaller chunks. Sharding involves splitting a database into smaller shards, which can be distributed across multiple servers. The solution : Wouldn't this be a better approach? 1) It shards the data better so I don't need to use starts_with. This article will help you understand what Database Sharding is and how MySQL Sharding works. As your data grows in size, the database. as Cassandra is column oriented DB. And indeed, these are very similar terms that deal with dividing large data sets into smaller subsets. UserIDs that are even would be on shard 0 and odd userIDs would be on shard 1. Each partition is a separate data store, but all of them have the same schema. The correct way to scale writes is sharding as you gave. 1 Answer. These settings specify the default sharding parameters for newly created databases. Certain databases offer out-of-the-box capabilities for sharding. Without sharding, the database is limited to vertical scaling alone, which is beneficial but limited. The decision to use sharding or partitioning depends on several factors, including the scale of your application, expected growth, query patterns, and data distribution requirements: Use Sharding When: Dealing with extremely large datasets that can’t be managed efficiently by a single server. A database can be split vertically — storing different tables & columns in a separate database, or horizontally — storing rows of a same table in multiple database nodes. I say this having worked with tables that were in the 10s of billions of rows without partitioning and were. This defeats the purpose of sharding/partitioning. g. Sharding involves saving the partitioned data onto other computers and storage facilities. I know that it is really hard to provide generic answer and things depend on factors like. A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. A good partition strategy should avoid Hot. Sharding is a good option for handling a situation like this. Sharding is the spreading of horizontal partitions across multiple servers. Each partition has the. Sharding takes a different approach to spreading the load among database instances. But if a database is sharded, it implies that the database has definitely been partitioned. Postgres built-in "native" partitioning—and sharding via PG extensions like Citus—are both tools to grow your Postgres database, scale your. If not, there will be big changes down the line until it is. Database sharding is a strategy for scaling a database by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces, or “shards”. 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. While connected to the mongos, issue a reshardCollection command that specifies the collection to be resharded and the new shard key: db. A bucket could be a table, a postgres schema, or a different physical database. I guess the cosmos UI behaves weirdly. Likewise, the data held in each is unique and independent of the. Sharding is a technique of partitioning database tables by row ("horizontally"); typically this technique requires a key to be selected that determines how the rows are to be partitioned. SQL partitioning proves beneficial in managing smaller tables, yet for enhanced scalability in SQL processing, it necessitates integration with either. Database sharding vs partitioning. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. If you will frequently update the date (users can. This means that the attributes of the Database will remain the same but only the records will change. Database Application level sharding is the process of splitting a table into multiple database instances in order to distribute the load. A simple hashing function can be the modulus of the key and the number of shards. partitions, with index_id = 1 for each partition used by the index. Splitting your data in 2 dimensions gives you even smaller data and index sizes. . return shardID. Oracle Sharding provides the best features and capabilities of mature RDBMS and NoSQL databases, as described here. Your client app creates objects in the synced realm. 在海量資料的儲存情境下,DB 的效能會受到影響,此時透過垂直擴充架構也許是無法滿足的,因此會需要資料分片(shard),以水平擴展的方式來提升效能(可以想像成多個公路比起一條道路,可以達到分流,減緩堵塞)。 水平擴展方式一般來說又可以分為 Horizontal Partitioning 與 Sharding,前者是在. It may be clear that a shard can have multiple partitions in it. Understanding Data Partitioning. Overview. A single SQL database has a limit to the volume of data that it can contain. At this time, MongoDB still uses a global lock per mongodb server. Partitioning. It is effective when queries tend to return only a subset of columns of the data. 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. I have three columns that seem like reasonable candidates for partitioning or indexing: Time (day or week, data spans a 4 month period)4. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, or for load balancing. It allows for faster access to data and enables a database to handle larger workloads by distributing data and processing power across multiple servers. Logical partitions are formed based on the value of a partition key that is associated with each item in a container. For performance, tables without correct indexes result in full table or clustered index scans. In this scenario, we start with 4 databases (DB1 to DB4) and use a hash-based sharding strategy. And if you are this far, go to method 2. A simple way to shard the data is -. 이때, 작은 단위를 샤드 (shard) 라고 부른다. Difference between Database Sharding vs Partitioning. The declaration includes the partitioning method as described above, plus a list of columns or expressions to be used as the partition key. System-managed sharding is a sharding method which does not require the user to specify mapping of data to shards. Database sharding vs partitioning. You separate them in another table / partition, and when you are performing updates, you do not update the. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. This initial. There are multiple possible sharding schemes to determine how to partition the data in a database: Range-based sharding: The database is sharded based on a certain value, such as name or ID number. 4 here. Include “PGSQL Phriday #011” in the title or first paragraph of your blog post. Sharding is one specific type of partitioning, part of what is called horizontal partitioning. However, in some use cases it can make sense to partition your database tables where parts of the table are distributed on different servers. The technique for distributing (aka partitioning) is consistent hashing”. 2. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. Sharding is needed if a data set is too large to be stored in a single DB. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. 4) Ordered index scan This scan will scan all. 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. Sharding partitions the data-set into discrete parts. In that context, two words that keep on showing up with regards to databases are sharding and partitioning. Read Databases Blogs Read about the latest AWS Databases product news and best practices What is database sharding? Database sharding is the process of storing a. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. It dispatches client requests to the relevant shards and aggregates the result from shards. Sharding and partitioning is great if your query logically touches only one of the shards or partitions. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset. b. Some popular ways in SQL Server to partition data are database sharding, partitioned views and table partitioning. So we decided to do shard our db into multiple instances. 1M rows in a table -- no problem. Horizontal partitioning, also known as Data Sharding, splits a database by rows into separate databases. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. Horizontal data partitioning or sharding is a technique for separating data into multiple partitions. Database normalization involves designing the tables in the database to reduce or eliminate duplicated data. You can definitely implement database sharding with MySQL very effectively. Partitioning: Splitting a big database into smaller subsets called partitions so that different partitions can be assigned to different nodes (also known as sharding). Database sharding is a technique used to optimize database performance at scale. The word “Shard” means “a small part of a whole“. Postgres 10 will include an overhaul of partitioning for single-node use to improve performance and enable more optimizations, e. Horizontally partitioning (sharding) data based on a partition key That data is heavily written. A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Here the data is divided based on a shard key onto a separate database server instance. Hashed sharding provides a more even data distribution across the sharded cluster at the cost of reducing Targeted Operations vs. Sharding Replication is not the same as sharding. Sharding refers to horizontal scaling, and was introduced to Weaviate in v1. The main reason to have vertical partition is when there are columns in the table that are updated more often than the rest. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. These two things can stack since they're different. 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. When partitioning a table, you need to consider having enough data for each partition. The leading % in the search is the killer here. MySQL's has no built-in sharding capability. 5. There is no way to perform consistent hashing because there is no way to obtain a consistent list, except by fiat. Database sharding isn’t anything like clustering database servers, virtualizing datastores or partitioning tables. Both methods aim to improve performance and scalability, but they differ in how they handle data distribution. The basics of partitioning. Sharding is possible with both SQL and NoSQL databases. All data fits in-memory. It goes far beyond all of that. Take the hash of the primary key, i. Another option would be to do the partitioning manually (i. In this diagram, the same colors are used on both sides of the. One of the critical benefits of database sharding is that it. MongoDB – Replication and Sharding. , aggregates, joins, are pushed down to the shards. The shard catalog database also acts as a query coordinator used to process multi-shard queries and queries that do not specify a sharding key. 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. Compared with the partitioning problem in. In fact, PostgreSQL has implemented sharding on top of partitioning by allowing any given partition of a partitioned table to be hosted by a remote server. The distinction of horizontal vs vertical comes from the traditional tabular view of a database. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Sharding September 8,. The value of this field determines which MongoDB. It involves breaking down a large database into smaller, more manageable pieces called shards. I am happy to discuss any of the above in more detail, but only in a more focused context. A shard is an individual partition that exists on separate database server instance to spread load. Partitioning provides very few use cases to justify its existence; sharding provides write scaling at the cost of complexity. Database sharding and. Let's dive right in -. Edit: Your interviewer is also wrong. , user ID), which yields a range of 0 to 400. It can be either a single indexed column or multiple columns denoted by a value that determines the data division between the shards. The Cons of Database. Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. Ví dụ ta có bảng dữ liệu thông tin về người dùng, ta sẽ dựa trên location của người dùng để quyết. Hence Sharding means dividing a larger part into smaller parts. In this video, we dive into the topic of Database Sharding vs Partitioning and break down the key differences between the two. Union views might provide the full original table view. Each shard is a separate database, stored on a different server, and only contains a portion of the. Sharding is a method for distributing a single dataset across multiple databases, which can then be stored on multiple machines. The application connects to the shard map manager database to obtain a copy of the shard map. You can shard by list (one shard for each unique key) or range (consecutive ranges of keys housed in the same shard). It involves breaking down a large database into smaller, more manageable pieces called shards. Sharding literally breaks a database into little pieces, with each instance only responsible for part of the database. 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. However, since YugabyteDB provides both, it’s important to use the right terminology. For a horizontal partitioning (sharding) tutorial, see Getting started with elastic query for horizontal partitioning (sharding). Q&A: Partitioning vs Sharding, Scaling Behavior, and Visualization Tools for YugabyteDB This Distributed SQL Tips & Tricks post looks at partitioning vs sharding, scaling limitations in RocksDB. Add parallelism so FDW requests can be issued in parallel. Partitioning is dividing large tables into multiple tables. When it comes to managing large databases, two common techniques are database sharding. This is done to distribute the load of a database across multiple servers and to improve performance. Range-based Partitioning. Sharding is used when Partitioning is not possible any more, e. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. 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. For true sharding then Skype's pl/proxy is probably the best. 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. Data Partitioning. Sharding (or database sharding) is the process of breaking up large tables, indexes, or partitions into smaller chunks called shards (or tablets in YugabyteDB) that. Vertical partitioning, aka row splitting, uses the same splitting techniques as database normalization, but ususally the term (vertical / horizontal) data partitioning refers to a. However, since YugabyteDB provides both, it’s important to use the right terminology. Each machine has its CPU, storage, and memory. Horizontal Partitioning. Sharding and partitioning are techniques to divide and scale large databases. Partitioning creates separate physical units within the same database in the same server, while sharding distributes data across multiple databases in different server. In version 11 (currently in beta), you can combine this with foreign data wrappers, providing a mechanism to natively shard your tables across multiple PostgreSQL servers. In this partitioning, each partition is a separate data store , but all partitions have the same schema . For example, high query rates can exhaust the CPU. Partitioning allows relational database schemas to scale with customer usage and application growth, without negatively affecting database performance. Sharding is a method for distributing data across multiple machines. It caches the shard map locally, and uses the map to route data requests to the appropriate shard. 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. A shard is a horizontal data partition that contains a subset of the total data set. Sharded vs. While everything looks fine, the. Replication can be simply understood as the duplication of the data-set whereas sharding is partitioning the data-set into discrete parts. Sharding is a database partitioning technique that involves horizontally breaking a large database into smaller, more manageable pieces called “shards. size of row; kind of data (strings, blobs, etc) active. Sharding is a technique to distribute large amounts of identically structured data across a number of independent databases. Jayant Chakravarti Senior Assistant Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis. MongoDB Sharding by foreign key. Sharding a database is a common scalability strategy for designing server-side systems. Recently, due to heavy traffic, CPU overload (over 98% utilization) in our database instance. Using both means you will shard your data-set across multiple groups of replicas. Sharding is a type of partitioning, such as Horizontal Partitioning (HP) There is also Vertical Partitioning (VP) whereby you split a table into smaller distinct parts. Each database server in the above architecture is called a Shard while the data is said to be partitioned. – Bill Karwin. In the simplest sense, sharding your database involves breaking up your big database into many, much smaller databases that share nothing and can be spread. There are two commonly used horizontal database scaling techniques: replication and horizontal partitioning (or sharding). Sharding makes it easy to generalize our data and allows for cluster computing (distributed computing). 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. If you get this right, database works beautifully. The. 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. Method 1: Yes the reason why every shard has to be checked. Each partition (also called a shard ) contains a subset of data. –Sharding is also referred as horizontal partitioning. Once connected, create two new databases that will act as our data shards. There are many methods to break a large dataset into shards. The partitioning algorithm evenly and randomly distributes data across shards. It is essential to choose a sharding key that balances the load and distributes the data. Thus, each shard operates as an independent database, consistent with its own schema, indexes, and data subsets. In that context, two words that keep on showing up with regards to databases are sharding and partitioning. Consistent hash and range sharding are the most useful data sharding strategies for a distributed SQL database. A range can be a portion of the chunk or the whole chunk. Database Sharding vs Partitioning – System Design Concepts . In this tutorial, we’ll discuss two methods for splitting databases into parts to manage them efficiently: sharding and partitioning. 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. Large databases usually have a negative impact on maintenance time, scalability and query performance. One of the most interesting and general approach is a built-in support for sharding. It also discusses best practices for partitioning and gives an in-depth view at how horizontal scaling works in Azure Cosmos DB. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. Partitioning -- won't help the use case you described. They exist within a single database instance, and are used to reduce the scope of data you're interacting with at a particular time, to cope with high data volume situations. The new storage engine "Spider" does work for its strong scalability to access other storage engine of MySQL, to idea to the most considerations are below; 1:Scalability. Within YugabyteDB partitioning is a user-defined, SQL-level concept, thus requiring an explicit definition through SQL. Hashing your partition key and keeping a mapping of how things route is key to a scalable sharding. g. sharding vs partitioning vs clustering vs replication. Sharding. The difference is that sharding implies the data is spread across multiple computers while partitioning does not. Because NoSQL databases are designed with distributed computing and automatic sharding in. The GO command signals the end of a batch of SQL statements. Some databases have out-of-the-box support for sharding. Database Sharding takes more work, but has the advantage. For instance, a query to retrieve all sales in the UK would directly target Partition = UK, avoiding unnecessary scans on data related. Therefore, the query performance improves significantly, and multiple queries can run in parallel on different machines. This spreads the workload of. You can use Postgres table partitioning in combination with Citus, for example if you have time-based partitions that you would want to drop after the retention time has expired. Partitioning is the process of breaking a large table into smaller tables. 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. So the data in each partition is unique but the schema remains the same. , user ID), which yields a range of 0 to 400. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed relational database service that provides great features to make sharding easy to use in the cloud. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. Sharding vs. – Kain0_0. 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. For example, if the code that is entered is 10 characters long, then first search the table with 10 character codes, without the leading percent sign, then search the table with 11 character codes,. Sharding: Targets the scalability of a database system as data or transaction rates rise. 2:Faster Access. This is not a new challenge; organizations have faced it for years, and horizontal sharding is one of the key patterns for solving it. Horizontal database partition or sharding is the mostly commonly used partitioning method in SQL databases. Do đó, “horizontal sharding” và “horizontal partitioning” có thể có nghĩa là cùng một kiến trúc hoặc. The schema of the table is replicated in every shard, and a unique portion of the whole table lives in. I thought this might make the query. <collection>", key: < shardkey >. It is a partitioned row store. Sharding spreads the load over more computers, which reduces contention and improves performance. Partitioning and sharding are two common ways to improve performance, manageability, and availability of larger databases. I may be wrong here but my understanding is that partitioning is a kind of sharding, usually referring to horizontal or row level sharding (although that may be platform specific). This functionality is hidden behind a series of APIs that are contained in the Elastic Database client library , which is available for Java and . As queries become more complex, and data is stored on disk, the performance comparison becomes more confusing. Database sharding is a popular approach to scaling out data stores. sharding in PostgreSQL. It relies on separating data into logical chunks so that they can be separat. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. 7. 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. For example you would split your vehicles table into multiple tables like: (assuming you want to use the vehicleNo as the "key") VehiclesNosLessThan1000After create a sharded document, when data are not evenly distributed, then mongodb will balance the data. partitioning. Particularly number 2 as Postgresql is notoriously. I was recently pointed to the article about DB Sharding (Shared Nothing). This led to the concept of Database Sharding. A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts.