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Sharding And Partitioning

1 post · Jun 2023

What this trail covers

Sharding and partitioning are techniques for dividing and scaling large databases. Sharding distributes data across multiple servers, while partitioning splits tables within a single server. PlanetScale leverages Vitess for sharding, offering horizontal scaling and near-infinite scalability. Partitioning divides tables within an instance for performance and manageability. Both techniques aim to improve performance, manageability, and availability of large databases.

All PlanetScale trails
  1. 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.