What does Sharding means from Database Design Perspective?

Question

What is the concept of Sharding from Database Design perspecitve ?

Answer 1

Partitioning the key space across a cluster of DB servers to distribute the service load and promote scalability of the overall system.

Answer 2

Well you could start by reading the wikipedia article on it, and perhaps the Hibernate Shards documentation. If you then have a more specific question, then ask that.

Horizontal partitioning is a design principle whereby rows of a database table are held separately, rather than splitting by columns (as for normalization). Each partition forms part of a shard, which may in turn be located on a separate database server or physical location. The advantage is the number of rows in each table is reduced (this reduces index size, thus improves search performance).