Database Sharding The Rise of Database Sharding The concept of Database Sharding has been gaining popularity over the past several years, due to the enormous growth in transaction volume and size of business application databases. This is particularly true for many successful online service providers, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, and social networking Web sites. Database Sharding can be simply defined as a "shared-nothing" partitioning scheme for large databases across a number of servers, enabling new levels of database performance and scalability achievable. If you think of broken glass, you can get the concept of sharding - breaking your database down into smaller chunks called “shards” and spreading those across a number of distributed servers. The term "sharding" was coined by Google engineers, and popularized through their publication of the Big Table architecture. However, the concept of "shared-nothing" database partitioning ha