A Guide to Database Sharding
When applications grow popular, they often face a good problem of attracting more users, and exponentially more data. While this growth signals business success, it creates technical challenges that can cripple even well-designed systems. The database, often the heart of any application, becomes the bottleneck that threatens to slow everything down.
Unlike application servers, which can be easily scaled to handle more traffic, databases resist horizontal scaling. We cannot simply add more database servers and expect our problems to vanish. This is where sharding enters the picture as an important solution to one of the most persistent challenges in modern application architecture.
In this article, we will learn about database sharding in more detail. We will understand what it is, why it matters, how different approaches work, and what key considerations are important when implementing it.
