Why you should care about sharding architecture In regards to databases, this approach falls under a distributed database architecture, where the aim is to spread the total load across multiple database instances. You’ve likely seen this approach before in other systems where application load is spread across multiple servers. This allows us to serve more requests and traffic from the growing number of customers while maintaining performance. This reduces the load on a single resource and instead distributes it equally across all the servers. Instead of storing all data on a single server, we distribute it across several servers. Each smaller component is called a shard. A sharded database architecture splits a large database into several smaller databases. Sharding is a way of scaling horizontally. You can watch the video and then start reading from the section Horizontally scaling graph databases. If you’d prefer a video primer on sharding, here is our five-minute video on what sharding is that’ll give you a brief introduction.
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Scaling a system can be very complex and involve many different facets. To do that, since the market is more or less always unpredictable, you have to ensure that your products can scale as you’re growing. This is the benchmark for all modern applications: faster and unrestricted access to data. Application performance is a key factor in the success of giants of the tech arena like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, that proved performance at mega-scale is possible.
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The effect of such issues is even more apparent as your application begins to scale, potentially leading to poor user experience and a loss of users. Database performance bottlenecks can make or break a product. However, that journey can include a range of hurdles that many developers and technologists neglect or forget about, particularly when it comes to scaling a database.Īs the core component of most modern architectures, databases have a tremendous responsibility. Whether you’re building a prototype or expanding your existing product, the goal is to reach a massive user base. Database sharding: How to scale a graph databaseĮveryone wants to build the next unicorn of a modern application.