Data Partitioning (Sharding)

Question 1

What is Data Partitioning (Sharding)?

Answer 1

Data partitioning (also known as sharding) is a technique to break up a big database (DB) into many smaller parts. It is the process of splitting up a DB/table across multiple machines

Question 2

What are the benefit of Data Partitioning ?

Answer 2

to improve the manageability, performance, availability and load balancing of an application.

Question 3

Why data partitioning is beneficial?

Answer 3

The justification for data sharding is that, after a certain scale point, it is cheaper and more feasible to scale horizontally by adding more machines than to grow it vertically by adding beefier servers.

Question 4

What are different type of Partitioning?

Answer 4

1. Horizontal partitioning
2. Vertical Partitioning
3. Directory Based Partitioning

Question 5

What are different criteria for partitioning?

Answer 5

1. Key or Hash-based partitioning
2. List partitioning
3. Round-robin partitioning
4. Composite partitioning

Question 6

What are the problems of partitioning?

Answer 6

1. Joins and Denormalization
2. Referential integrity
3. Rebalancing