Shard (database architecture)

Common card · No. 288017

A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data within a database or search engine. Each shard may be held on a separate database server instance in order to spread across multiple servers. Some data in a database may remain present in all shards, while other data is stored in only one shard. In such cases, each shard acts as the single source for its subset of data.