Sharding vs. partitioning: What’s the difference?

This post clarifies the distinction between database sharding and partitioning. It defines sharding as distributing data across multiple instances based on a shard key, providing a MySQL example with regional distribution. It also defines partitioning as splitting tables within a single instance, illustrating with a range-based partitioning example in MySQL. The post outlines the advantages and disadvantages of each technique and concludes by emphasizing their shared goal of database scaling and management.