Db sharding vs partitioning. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. Db sharding vs partitioning

 
 sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for PostgresDb sharding vs partitioning  By using separate partition keys for each tenant, you can easily query the data for a single tenant

Database Application level sharding is the process of splitting a table into multiple database instances in order to distribute the load. e. PostgreSQL 11 addressed various limitations that existed with the usage of partitioned tables in PostgreSQL, such as the inability to create indexes, row-level triggers, etc. This spreads the workload of. There are many methods to break a large dataset into shards. This is done to distribute the load of a database across multiple servers and to improve performance. Sharding is more general and is usually used when the database is split on several servers. "Plain" MongoDB use sharding instead, and you can set up a document property that should be used as a delimiter for how your data should be sharded. It is effective when queries tend to return only a subset of columns of the data. Within YugabyteDB partitioning is a user-defined, SQL-level concept, thus requiring an explicit definition through SQL. Partitioning -- won't help the use case you described. The database sharding examples below demonstrate how range sharding might work using the data from the store database. Each shard is responsible for a subset of the workload, and queries can be. I thought this might make. Sharding is typically used to scale storage and query processing, with the goal being that the database 'as a whole' provides the abstraction of a single, unified logical repository of data, typically managed by a single organization. The. Horizontal partitioning is often referred as Database Sharding. User IDs 1 and 3 are in shard 1, User IDs 2 and 4 are in shard 2. A sharding key is an attribute or column that determines how the data is distributed among the shards. Federation vs. 3 Answers. Now, I need to have a way to access the data in this table quickly, so I'm researching partitions and indexes. Because xa transaction and partitioning is supported, it can do decentralized arrangement to two or more servers of data of same table. You can also query across multiple tenants, even if they are in separate partitions. Database Sharding is the process where a huge Database is partitioned horizontally. A hashing function hashes the sharding key value, and the output maps data to a particular shard. The basis for this is in PostgreSQL’s Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) support, which has been a part of the core of PostgreSQL for a long time. In this scenario, we start with 4 databases (DB1 to DB4) and use a hash-based sharding strategy. Partitioning is the process of breaking a large table into smaller tables. MongoDB uses the shard key associated to the collection to partition the data into chunks owned by a specific shard. partitioning. A sharded database is a collection of shards . Read Databases Blogs Read about the latest AWS Databases product news and best practices What is database sharding? Database sharding is the process of storing a. Implementing table partitioning on a table that is exceptionally large in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is not trivial due to the large data movement operations involved, and potential downtime needed to accomplish them efficiently. In that context, two words that keep on showing up. Azure Cosmos DB uses partitioning to scale individual containers in a database to meet the performance needs of your application. See moreThe decision to use sharding or partitioning depends on several factors, including the scale of your application, expected growth, query patterns, and data. A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Many modern databases have built-in sharding system. In the second method, the writer chooses a random number between 1 and 10 for ten shards, and suffixes it onto the partition key before updating the item. The list of popular data partitioning techniques is as follows: Horizontal Partitioning. Partitions link objects in Realm Database to documents in MongoDB. Sharding is one specific type of partitioning, part of what is called horizontal partitioning. The declaration includes the partitioning method as described above, plus a list of columns or expressions to be used as the partition key. Sharding is a good option for handling a situation like this. 3:Data Synchronizations. Partitioning is a general term used to describe the breaking up of your logical data elements into multiple entities typically for the purpose of performance, availability, or maintainability. Database partitioning is the backbone of modern system design, which helps to improve scalability, manageability, and availability. Each shard holds the data for a contiguous range of shard keys (A-G and H-Z), organized alphabetically. Once connected, create two new databases that will act as our data shards. Each partition (also called a shard ) contains a subset of data. A simple hashing function can be the modulus of the key and the number of shards. There are a large number of databases that businesses use today in order to perform their day-to-day operations. 1. The technique for distributing (aka partitioning) is consistent hashing”. Your app had better know exactly where to find the data (or at least where to find where to find the data). In this post, I describe how to use Amazon RDS to implement a. Database sharding involves partitioning data across multiple servers, so each server contains a subset of the data. A range can be a portion of the chunk or the whole chunk. 1M WordPress "users", each owning Database with. This initial. Each partition is known as a "shard". Sharding is a very important concept that helps the system to keep data in different resources according to the sharding process. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Sharding database is feasible with the use of both SQL as well as NoSQL databases. But if your query has to visit every shard or partition, then it's more costly. Sharding Scenario: Adding a Database in a Hash-based Sharding Strategy. Sharding is a database scaling technique based on horizontal partitioning of data across multiple independent physical databases. Each chunk has inclusive lower and exclusive upper limits based on the shard key. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. Recently, due to heavy traffic, CPU overload (over 98% utilization) in our database instance. Sharding is one specific type of. It is essential to choose a sharding key that balances the load and distributes the data. If any of this is true, database sharding can be a potential solution to your problems. The main of goal of partitioning is to aid in maintenance of large tables. Database sharding is a technique used to distribute the data in a database across multiple servers, or shards, in order to improve scalability and performance. When you partition a table in MySQL, the table is split up into several logical units known as partitions, which are stored separately on disk. By. By dividing a large table into smaller, individual tables, queries that access only a fraction of the data can run faster and use less CPU because there is less data to scan. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. I know that it is really hard to provide generic answer and things depend on factors like. The leading % in the search is the killer here. Database sharding is a technique used to optimize database performance at scale. Unlike Sharding and Replication, Partitioning is vertical scaling because each data partition is in the same. Partitioning options on a table in MySQL in the environment of the Adminer tool. Each partition of data is called a shard. However I also want to store the items of every user in the same region. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. The disadvantage is ultimately you are limited by what a single server can do. . Database sharding is the optimization of large databases by splitting data from a larger database table into multiple smaller tables (shards). Sharding is actually a type of database partitioning, more specifically, Horizontal Partitioning. The idea is to distribute data that can’t fit on a single node onto a cluster of database nodes. 3. 1. Là cách chia cùng dữ liệu của cùng một bảng (table) ra nhiều DB khác nhau. Whether you're sharding by a granular uuid, or by something higher in your model hierarchy like customer id, the approach of hashing your shard key before you leverage it remains the same. Sharding is the spreading of horizontal partitions across multiple servers. Sharding is a type of partitioning, such as Horizontal Partitioning (HP) There is also Vertical Partitioning (VP) whereby you split a table into smaller distinct parts. Sharding. , user ID), which yields a range of 0 to 400. This article explains the relationship between logical and physical partitions. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed relational database service that provides great features to make sharding easy to use in the cloud. Throughput is constrained by architectural factors and the number of concurrent connections that it supports. This defeats the purpose of sharding/partitioning. The motivation behind this is clear, it makes the task of ensuring service levels on the database easier because the data set is smaller and it allows one to prioritize the investment to improve an aspect of the system because of the logical separation (e. Hashed sharding uses either a single field hashed index or a compound hashed index (New in 4. The distribution used in system-managed sharding is intended to. A shard is an individual partition that exists on separate database server instance to spread load. A single SQL database has a limit to the volume of data that it can contain. Next steps. Functional partitions — Functional partitioning means dedicating different nodes to different tasks. Sharding on a Single Field Hashed Index. g. Sharding vs. In this systems design video I will be going over how to scale databases using database partitioning, in particular horizontal partitioning aka sharding and. Mỗi partitions có cùng schema và cột, nhưng cũng có các hàng hoàn toàn khác nhau. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. Sharding is a specific type of partitioning in which dat. Horizontal partitioning is achieved in a relational database by storing rows from the same table in several database nodes. For a horizontal partitioning (sharding) tutorial, see Getting started with elastic query for horizontal partitioning (sharding). Yes, it does make sense to shard on a single server. Third, choose a data-check strategy to compare the data between the original database and new sharding cluster. Cassandra is NOT a column oriented database. Yes, sharding is splitting data into a subset per cluster. Certain databases offer out-of-the-box capabilities for sharding. 2. A database can be split vertically — storing different tables & columns in a separate database or horizontally — storing rows of a same table in multiple database nodes. For example, if you intend on having a /api/users endpoint, you should have users collection and it should contain any and everything you intend to return on that endpoint. To shard Postgres, you can use Citus. e. Sharding vs. Each partition has the. The mongos acts as a query router for client applications, handling both read and write operations. In other cases, rebalancing is an administrative task that consists of two stages. Sharding distributes data across multiple servers, while partitioning splits tables within one server. Horizontal partitioning is another term for sharding. Both methods aim to improve performance and scalability, but they differ in how they handle data distribution. Sharding is partitioning where the database is split across multiple smaller databases to improve performance and reading time. The distinction ofhorizontal vs vertical comes from the traditional tabular view of a database. To introduce horizontal scaling, the database is split into horizontal partitions, now called. Suppose we know that we need to spread the data of this SQL table into 4 servers. There are two types of Sharding: Horizontal Sharding: Each new table has the same schema as the big table. The closer FILTER nodes can be deployed to *CollectionNodes to reduce the amount of the. : Confusing terminology! network partitioning ≠ data partitioning consistent hashing ≠ consistency. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. Sharding is a form of partitioning, with the emphasis being that each shard is located on a separate physical node. Generally if you are sharding you would also want to have each shard backed by a replica set, but the two concepts are in fact orthogonal. Third, choose a data-check strategy to compare the data between the original database and new sharding cluster. As I understand the strategy Cosmos DB use is partitioning with partition keys, but since we use the MongoDB. You can use DocumentDB accounts to. Database partitioning vs. Hashed sharding provides a more even data distribution across the sharded cluster at the cost of reducing Targeted Operations vs. Jeremy Holcombe , October 18, 2023. Range-based Partitioning. Partitioning is a generic term used for dividing a large database table into multiple smaller parts. If not, there will be big changes down the line until it is. Think of each partition like being a different file - and opening 365 files might be slower than having a huge one. Sharding Scenario: Adding a Database in a Hash-based Sharding Strategy. Database partitioning is a method for dividing a database into separate sections called partitions. Non-Monotonically Changing Shard KeysThe following image illustrates a sharded cluster using the field X as the shard key. 3 replicas N. DrawbacksA shard is essentially a horizontal data partition that contains a subset of the total data set, and hence is responsible for serving a portion of the overall workload. Sharding can be used in system design interviews to help demonstrate a candidate’s understanding of scalability. It is a way of splitting data into smaller pieces so that data can be efficiently accessed and managed. So we decided to do shard our db into multiple instances. It is responsible for serving a portion of the overall workload. I position SQL partitioning here because it divides tables, thereby placing it at a higher level than the previously discussed row distribution but at a lower level than database sharding. A simple way to shard the data is -. See more on the basics of sharding here. you are leveraging database sharding. A database can be split vertically. For example, you can. In this post, SingleStore Developer Advocate, Joe Karlsson, explains the differences between database sharding vs. For hashed sharding: The sharding operation creates empty chunks to cover the entire range of the shard key values and performs an initial chunk distribution. Mike Grayson: Sharding is the act of partitioning your collections so that parts of your data are dispersed among multiple servers called shards. One of the critical benefits of database sharding is that it. We achieve horizontal scalability through sharding”. When I try to create a new collection by clicking on the ellipses button on a DB or choose existing DB, it doesn't provide the option to create collection without supplying shard key. In replication, we basically copy the database across multiple databases to provide a quicker look and less response time. Database systems with large data sets or high throughput applications can challenge the capacity of a single server. Hazelcast named in the Gartner ® Market Guide for Event Stream Processing. Sharding makes it easy to generalize our data and allows for cluster computing (distributed computing). This article will help you understand what Database Sharding is and how MySQL Sharding works. Sharding -- only if you need to 1000 writes per second. The balancer migrates data between shards. Table A holds items 1–5000 and Table B holds items 5001–10000. For performance, tables without correct indexes result in full table or clustered index scans. Using both means you will shard your data-set across multiple groups of replicas. Figure 1 is an example of a sharding database. Each. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory, and can be read or written in parallel. It is especially popular with cloud developers creating Software as a Service (SAAS) offerings for end customers or businesses. Sharding is a method of partitioning data to distribute the computational and storage workload, which helps in achieving hyperscale computing. A lot of the options are described on our site here, as well as the advanced options we support. Each partition (also called a shard ) contains a subset of data. About Oracle Sharding. A single DocumentDB account can contain several databases, and it specifies in which region the databases are created. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Customer id vs. 5. I am happy to discuss any of the above in more detail, but only in a more focused context. The technique divides the data into buckets using some type of hash key such as a date and/or a natural key. g. What is Database Sharding? | Hazelcast. Partitioning is the idea of splitting something large into smaller chunks. Problem. In the simplest sense, sharding your database involves breaking up your big database into many, much smaller databases that share nothing and can be spread. The value of this field determines which MongoDB. The reasoning being is because partitioning is just a linear reduction in the amount of data, whereas B-Tree indexes results in a logarithmic reduction in the amount of data to search - which is a much smaller reduction comparatively. For maintenance, these large single databases have to be backed up daily while the amount of actual changing data might be small. It dispatches client requests to the relevant shards and aggregates the result from shards. In the first method, the data sits inside one shard. A shard is a horizontal data partition that holds a portion of the complete data set and is thus in the responsibility of serving a portion of the overall demand. The primary difference is one of administration. Q&A: Partitioning vs Sharding, Scaling Behavior, and Visualization Tools for YugabyteDB This Distributed SQL Tips & Tricks post looks at partitioning vs sharding, scaling limitations in RocksDB. The most important factor is the choice of a sharding key. Thus, each shard operates as an independent database, consistent with its own schema, indexes, and data subsets. Post-hash, documents with "close" shard key values are unlikely to be on the same chunk or shard - the mongos is more likely to perform Broadcast Operations to fulfill a given ranged query. It allows for faster access to data and enables a database to handle larger workloads by distributing data and processing power across multiple servers. This is a topic near and dear to me and I’m excited to think about it some this month. It also discusses best practices for partitioning and gives an in-depth view at how horizontal scaling works in Azure Cosmos DB. Database partitioning is the act of splitting a database into separate parts, usually for manageability, performance or availability reasons. Database sharding vs partitioning? Luka Antić on LinkedIn 14 Like Comment Share Copy; LinkedIn; Facebook; Twitter; To view or add a comment, sign in. However, while both are often used interchangeably, partitioning expects the data divided off to be stored on the same computer. Some data stores, such as Cosmos DB, can automatically rebalance partitions. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, as for load balancing. To improve query response will it be better to shard the data or replicate existing shards for faster response. In this case, the table used for the benchmark has 1. If [couch_peruser] q is set, that value is used for per-user databases. Sharding on Azure SQL is a type of horizontal partitioning that splits large databases into smaller components, which are faster and easier to manage. 1M rows in a table -- no problem. Horizontal data partitioning or sharding is a technique for separating data into multiple partitions. With a distributed database, you can place nodes in different local regions to decrease this latency. Include “PGSQL Phriday #011” in the title or first paragraph of your blog post. Partitioning a table using the SQL Server Management Studio Partitioning wizard. Sharding on the other hand, and the load balancing of shards, is a storage level concept that is performed automatically by YugabyteDB based on your replication factor. Sharding facilitates the possibility of adding more machines to spread out the load. sharding in PostgreSQL. It can be either a single indexed column or multiple columns denoted by a value that determines the data division between the shards. A sharded database is a single logical Oracle Database that is horizontally partitioned across a pool of physical Oracle Databases (shards) that share no hardware or software. As your data grows in size, the database. –Sharding is also referred as horizontal partitioning. With the non-partitioned tables of course, you could use native foreign keys. 5. This functionality is hidden behind a series of APIs that are contained in the Elastic Database client library , which is available for Java and . However, since YugabyteDB provides both, it’s important to use the right terminology. Solutions. PartitioningData partitioning can be done horizontally or vertically, while sharding is usually done horizontally. Sharding is any time you split your large database into smaller pieces to limit full table scans during runtime. So that leaves two more options. Database Sharding and Database Partitioning are similar in that they both divide a larger database into smaller parts, but the way they handle and distribute data differs. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of “partitioning vs. But if a database is sharded, it implies that the database has definitely been partitioned. Sharding is a database architecture pattern related to horizontal partitioning — the practice of separating one table’s rows into multiple different tables, known as partitions. The document you're quoting from is speaking of a more abstract concept of. I thought this might make the query. 4: Table A is split horizontally into two tables. It is estimated that 180 zettabytes of data will be created by. Later in the example, we will use a collection of books. Sharding vs Partitioning. Most Citus setups I have seen primarily use Citus sharding, and not Postgres table partitioning. Conclusion: Sharding and partitioning are cornerstone techniques in modern database architectures. Sharding is a technique of partitioning database tables by row ("horizontally"); typically this technique requires a key to be selected that determines how the rows are to be partitioned. It is useful when no single machine can handle large modern-day workloads, by allowing you to scale horizontally. country key to separate the data into shards. The main reason to have vertical partition is when there are columns in the table that are updated more often than the rest. A chunk consists of a range of sharded data. Each partition is a separate data store, but all of them have the same schema. Replication can be simply understood as the duplication of the data-set whereas sharding is partitioning the data-set into discrete parts. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. You can have single partitions in the table expire, without needing to set the option to all tables in the dataset. Consistent hash sharding is better for scalability and preventing hot spots, while range sharding is better for range based queries. Sharding on the other hand, and the load balancing of shards, is a storage level concept that is performed automatically by YugabyteDB based on your replication factor. Shard-Key. Partitioning is a rather general concept and can be applied in many contexts. A good partition strategy should avoid Hot. Broadcast Operations. System Design for Beginners: Design for Experienced Engineers: a member fo. We distribute the data across our databases as follows: A partitioned table is split to multiple physical disks, so accessing rows from different partitions can be done in parallel. Particularly number 2 as Postgresql is notoriously. Database denormalization. April 29, 2022. In a database, horizontal partitioning, also known as sharding, involves dividing the rows of a table into smaller tables and storing them on different servers or database instances. The more users that blockchain networks take on, the slower the network becomes. This led to the concept of Database Sharding. The Pros of Database Sharding. What are partitioning and sharding? It has been possible to do partitioning in PostgreSQL for quite a while — splitting what is logically one large table into smaller physical tables. A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding MongoDB Sharding. Azure's best practices on data partitioning says: All databases are created in the context of a DocumentDB account. Sharding is a method for distributing data across multiple machines. sharding allows for horizontal scaling of data writes by partitioning data across. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss two methods for splitting databases into parts to manage them efficiently: sharding and partitioning. Partitioning creates separate physical units within the same database in the same server, while sharding distributes data across multiple databases in different server. Sharding is a database. Distributed. . Choosing a partition key is an important decision that affects your application's performance. The shard catalog also contains the master copy of all duplicated tables in an SDB. The distinction of horizontal vs vertical comes from the traditional tabular view of a database. You can shard by list (one shard for each unique key) or range (consecutive ranges of keys housed in the same shard). What is Sharding? Sharding is a database architecture pattern related to horizontal partitioning — the practice of separating one table’s rows into multiple different tables, known as partitions. Sharding is a common practice at companies with relational databases. Add parallelism so FDW requests can be issued in parallel. Sharding Typically, when we think of partitioning, we’re describing the process of breaking a table into smaller, more manageable tables on the same database server. sharding. Here's is a figure from MySQL's official documentation on shard key. Each partition of data is called a shard. Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. sharding# Database partitioning deals with a single database instance, whereas sharding splits partitions (shards) across multiple database instances for scalability and availability. A shard is a data store in its own right (it can contain the data for many entities of. In this post, I describe how to use Amazon RDS to implement a sharded database. Database sharding needs to be done in such a way that the incoming data should be inserted into a correct shard, there should not be any data loss and the result queries should not be slow. Sharding at the core is splitting your data up to where it resides in smaller chunks, spread across distinct separate buckets. Use a message queue (Redis (pub/sub) or RabbitMQ) to throttle db writes. The balancer migrates data between shards. The less number of records a query has to run over, the more performant it will be. Can have up to 4000 partitions, whereas a query using date sharded tables can only query up to 1000 tables at once. I may be wrong here but my understanding is that partitioning is a kind of sharding, usually referring to horizontal or row level sharding (although that may be platform specific). What is Database Sharding? Sharding, also often called partitioning, involves splitting data up based on keys. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset. Sharding makes it easy to generalize our data and allows for cluster computing (distributed computing). Database Sharding and Database Partitioning are similar in that they both divide a larger database into smaller parts, but the way they handle and distribute data differs. With it, there is dedicated syntax to create range and list *partitioned* tables and their partitions. If sharding is unfair, then a single node might be taking all the load and other nodes might sit idle. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. For example, in an ecommerce application, you might have one database node serving product catalog data, and another database node capturing and processing orders. Partitioning: Splitting a big database into smaller subsets called partitions so that different partitions can be assigned to different nodes (also known as sharding). For me this was one of the most confusing aspects of learning this stuff because they are often used interchangeably and there is a certain amount of overlap between the terms. 2:Faster Access. To find the. It separates very large databases into smaller, faster and more easily. Choosing a partition key is an important decision that affects your application's performance. Partitioning involves dividing a database into smaller, logical partitions based on specific criteria. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. However, since YugabyteDB provides both, it’s important to use the right terminology. A database node, sometimes referred as a physical shard, contains multiple logical shards. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. I have been reading about scalable architectures recently. 6 GB of data for 2019 (until June in this one). By sharding, you divided your collection. reshardCollection: "<database>. Because NoSQL databases are designed with distributed computing and automatic sharding in. Sharding Process. 131. It's not necessary to understand these. b. Row-based sharding. Consistent hashing is a technique widely used in load balancing and routing service. There are many ways to split a dataset into shards. Sharding is a type of partitioning, such as. Jeremy Holcombe , October 18, 2023. I was recently pointed to the article about DB Sharding (Shared Nothing). A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding MongoDB Sharding. Key Differences Between Database Sharding and Partitioning. On the other hand, data partitioning is when the database is. . By default, the operation creates 2 chunks per shard and migrates across the cluster. Sharding is a strategy for scaling out your database by storing partitions of your data across multiple servers instead of putting everything on a single giant one. Database sharding is a strategy for scaling a database by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces, or “shards”. In today’s data-driven world, where the volume and complexity of data continue to expand at an unprecedented pace, the need for robust and scalable database solutions has become paramount. The GO command signals the end of a batch of SQL statements. However, in some use cases it can make sense to partition your database tables where parts of the table are distributed on different servers. In this example, product inventory data is divided into shards based on the product key. – Bill Karwin. Database sharding vs partitioning. Do đó, “horizontal sharding” và “horizontal partitioning” có thể có nghĩa là cùng một kiến trúc hoặc. However, while both are often used interchangeably, partitioning expects the data divided off to be stored on the same computer. To illustrate, let’s say you have a database that stores information about all the products. Sharding Process. So we decided to do shard our db into multiple instances. That feature is called shard key. All data fits in-memory. It seems to me a bit like Sharding to Oracle RAC is like SQL Server partitioning is to Oracle Partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 sharding with foreign data wrappers and partitioning. The word “Shard” means “a small part of a whole“. YugabyteDB supports both hash and range sharding of data across nodes to enable the. The hash function can take more than one sharding. A database can be split vertically — storing different tables & columns in a separate database, or horizontally — storing rows of a same table in multiple database nodes. Most importantly, sharding allows a DB to scale in line with its data growth. 在海量資料的儲存情境下,DB 的效能會受到影響,此時透過垂直擴充架構也許是無法滿足的,因此會需要資料分片(shard),以水平擴展的方式來提升效能(可以想像成多個公路比起一條道路,可以達到分流,減緩堵塞)。 水平擴展方式一般來說又可以分為 Horizontal Partitioning 與 Sharding,前者是在. . Even 1 billion rows may not need any of those fancy actions. Figure 1 - Horizontally partitioning (sharding) data based on a partition key. 5. A primary key can be used as a sharding key. In this simple query the RETURN & GATHER -nodes are on the coordinator; the nodes upwards including the REMOTE -node are deployed to the DB-server.