What is Database Sharding: What It Is and How It Works

Understanding database sharding with code examples

Vishal Barvaliya
4 min readJun 13, 2024

If you’ve ever wondered how big websites handle huge amounts of data quickly and efficiently, one of the key techniques they use is database sharding. This guide will explain what database sharding is, how it works, and walk you through a simple example with code explanations.

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What is Database Sharding?

Think of a giant library with millions of books. Instead of keeping all the books in one massive room, you split them into smaller rooms based on categories like fiction, non-fiction, science, etc. This makes it easier to find a book because you only need to search in a smaller section.

Database sharding works in a similar way. Instead of storing all data in one big database, you split the data into smaller, more manageable pieces called shards. Each shard is stored on a separate server. This way, the database can handle more requests at once, making it faster and more efficient.

Why Do We Use Sharding?

1. Scalability:

  • As your data grows, sharding helps your database handle more information and more requests without slowing down.

2. Performance:

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Vishal Barvaliya

I write about Data Engineering, Data Analytics, Data Science, and Big Data. LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalbarvaliya/