What Is Sharding?

Sharding is a technique for splitting data into smaller parts known as shards. Sharding can be viewed as a very specific type of partitioning, namely — horizontal partitioning. The biggest pros of sharding are that it can isolate contention to a single level of the system and decrease the amount of distributed operations. Despite its significance, sharding also has some cons, and there are certain problems you may encounter if you use it.