Relational database storage - Azure SQL database - Sharding

4 important questions on Relational database storage - Azure SQL database - Sharding

What is sharding? Name all types sharding?

Database architecture design pattern related to partitioning. There are  three types of sharding:
  • Range strategy. The keys are sequential -composite- and each range is stored shared in a particular shard.
  • Lookup strategy. All data of a key is stored in a specific shard.
  • Hash strategy. The data is stored by calculating a hash of the key.

Sharding is a method of scaling out.

What is a range sharding strategy?

A range sharding strategy is storing data into separate tables using ranges based on the sharding key.
Advantage is that shards can be created by region or date range.
Disadvantage is that reconfiguring is hard and this strategy provides no load balancing ability.

What is a lookup sharding strategy?

A central mapping is used to determine where data is stored.
Advantage is that physical data can be modified without modifying the application code.
Disadvantage is that it can impact performance, because the location of the shard mapping needs to be queried first.
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What is a hash sharding strategy?

The key is used to calculate a hash value, that is used to distribute the data among shards. Routing can be accomplished by using the hash function. Computing the hash might impact impose addtional overhead.
Rebalancing hash shards is difficult.

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