The IT industry is one big word generator. Even better, it is a meaning generator. There are words or acronyms to describe every single functionality, but at the same time, one word can describe a bunch of different functionalities, or one functionality can be described by two or more different words. Recently, I found an old article about the differences between sharding and partitioning in general. This article tries to describe sharding as partitioning. It is not my aim to judge this, but I would like to write a couple of things about the use of sharding.
How Does It Work?
Sharding is simply a division of a big set of data into many small packs. Databases are the specimen — you divide your old big database in many small databases, each located on a separate machine. You rely on the application level layer to decide to which "shard" to send a query (here is a small difference from partitioning, where the decision is made at the database level).