Partitioning vs sharding. Both systems use some form of partition key for partitioning the data. Partitioning vs sharding

 
Both systems use some form of partition key for partitioning the dataPartitioning vs sharding  The policy triggers an additional background process that takes place after the creation of extents, following data ingestion

Almost always a single table is better than splitting up the table (multiple tables; PARTITIONing; sharding). sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. You want to ensure that table lookups go to the correct partition or group of partitions. You need to make subsequent reads for the partition key against each of the 10 shards. In the previous article, I explained the distinction between database sharding (as seen in Citus) and Distributed SQL (such as YugabyteDB) in terms of architectural nuances:. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. By default, Spark/PySpark creates partitions that are equal to the number of CPU cores in the machine. By default, the operation creates 2 chunks per shard and migrates across the cluster. Partitioning vs. System-managed sharding uses partitioning by consistent hash to randomly distribute data across shards. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, [a] but some appear only in a single shard. Reads are performed within a. The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. Most importantly, sharding allows a DB to scale in line with its data growth. Each physical database in such a configuration is called a shard. We also have quite a few databases of all sizes. The primary difference is one of administration. A database can be split vertically — storing different. Each partition has the. Actual latency for purely in-memory data could be similar. 水平擴展方式一般來說又可以分為 Horizontal Partitioning 與 Sharding,前者是在同一個資料庫中將 table 拆成數個小 table,後者則是將 table 放到數個資料庫中。Horizontal Partitioning 的 table 與 schema 可能會改變,Sharding 的 schema 則是相同,但分散在不同資料庫中。The question of partitioning vs. Each shard is typically assigned to a different database server, which allows for parallel processing and faster query execution times. There is another notable scenario where Redis Cluster will lose writes, that happens during a network partition where a client is isolated with a minority of instances including at least a master. The. Within YugabyteDB partitioning is a user-defined, SQL-level concept, thus requiring an explicit definition through SQL. It is useful for large, high-traffic applications that require high availability and fast response times. Redis Cluster does not use consistent hashing,. This key is an attribute of. The concept is simplistic and enables scalability in distributed computing, but. Data is not only read but is partially processed on the remote servers (to the extent that this. Sharding and moving away from MySQL. 2 Answers. In a segment/partition system, it is possible to go back the same memory after swapping but the larger the physical memory, the less likely it will be to return to the same place. Each machine has its CPU, storage, and memory. To introduce horizontal scaling, the database is split into horizontal partitions, now called. In a key- or hashed -based sharding architecture, a database application uses a shard key to locate a shard. SQL Server requires application-level logic for sending queries to the best node . Database shards are based on the fact that after a certain point it is feasible and. Sharding partitions the data-set into discrete parts. A Shard is a logical partition of the collection, containing a subset of documents from the collection, such that every document in a collection is contained in exactly one Shard. This defeats the purpose of sharding/partitioning. In this strategy, each partition is a separate data store, but all partitions have the same schema. Jayant Chakravarti Senior Assistant Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis. The sharding algorithm is a 64bit Murmur-3 hash. Partitioning -- won't help the use case you described. Sharding is possible with both SQL and NoSQL databases. Sharded vs. The main difference is that sharding explicitly imposes the necessity to split. You may need to partition on an attribute of the data if: The consumers of the topic need to aggregate by some attribute of the data. We also have quite a few databases of all sizes. It is the mechanism to partition a table across one or more foreign servers. Both the techniques split a huge data set into different chunks and store it on different database servers. Sharding: Partitionning over several server, allowing parallel access (of different datas as opposed to replication) and, as such, memory and cpu load. I feel. Sharded vs. "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. On the other hand, data partitioning is when the database is. Vertical Partitioning In contrast to horizontal partitioning, vertical partitioning lets you restrict which columns you send to other destinations, so you can replicate a limited subset of a table's columns to other machines. Some of these databases are highly commercialized and are suitable for a broader range of scenarios. Shard (database architecture) A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. 1. Partition keys are Unicode strings, with a maximum length limit. a. It helps you in case you need to separate data in a big table to improve performance, or even to purge data in an easy way, among other situations. Horizontal partitioning (or row-based partitioning) means that data is split in multiple tables based on predicate you define (most often it relates to dates, so data is being partitioned by year, month, even day – if it makes. The database sharding examples below demonstrate how range sharding might work using the data from the store database. The advantage of DBMS single server partitioning is that it is relatively simple to set up and manage. Queries are simple. Horizontal partitioning is another term for sharding. Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. You want to concentrate data for efficiency of storage and/or indexing. However they’re still somewhat common, the google analytics 360 bigquery export for example, provides a new table shard each day, for the new data from the prior day. NHỮNG CÁCH THỨC PHÂN CHIA DỮ LIỆU. The idea is to distribute data that can’t fit on a. Rather, you can choose to use Postgres native partitioning, or you can shard Postgres with an extension like Citus to distribute Postgres across multiple nodes—or you can use both. A shard key is selected to decide which shard a data row should go into. These queries run in serial, not parallel execution. In traditional database structures, sharding is a form of data partitioning (horizontal partitioning) which allows data from a single database to be stored across multiple servers. Database sharding is the process of storing a large database across multiple machines. When a clustered index has multiple partitions, each partition has a B-tree structure that contains the data for that specific partition. In the context of scaling MongoDB: replication creates additional copies of the data and allows for automatic failover to another node. Partition Service Fabric stateless services. In this post, SingleStore Developer Advocate, Joe Karlsson, explains the differences between database sharding vs. Think of each partition like being a different file - and opening 365 files might be slower than having a huge one. Difference between Database Sharding vs Partitioning. Imagine a sales database, we can. Database sharding is the process of dividing the data into partitions which can then be stored in multiple database instances. Big Data: Partitioning vs Sharding Adjust Here at Adjust we use both. Understanding MongoDB Sharding & Difference From Partitioning. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. Actual latency for purely in-memory data could be similar. 2 , the Oracle Sharding feature provides the exact capability of shared nothing architecture with. I described the PDP as using segments. There are a number of base access methods: 1) Primary key access 2) Unique key access (== 2 primary key accesses) 3) Partition pruned scan access (Partition Key is provided in condition) (this can be both an ordered index scan or full scan). We should specifically mention here that in partitioning , the partitions lies within a single database instance whereas in sharding the shards lies across different database servers. Algorithmically sharded databases use a sharding function (partition_key) -> database_id to locate data. The goal is so these validators will not know which shard they will get in advance. Let’s look at some examples. A sharding key is an attribute or column that determines how the data is distributed among the shards. Solutions. Sharding on Azure SQL is a type of horizontal partitioning that splits large databases into smaller components, which are faster and easier to manage. We also did a whole Postgres FM episode on partitioning. ) "Partitioning" -- a special syntax that builds sub-tables, but reference it as if it were a single table. Figure 4:Side-by-side comparison of Schema-based sharding vs. Each shard is responsible for a subset of the workload, and queries can be. Essentially, sharding is just a fancy name given to the process of splitting the dataset along its rows. Database sharding is also referred to as horizontal partitioning. For sharding, the data model should ensure that data and queries are distributed evenly across the shards. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. When you shard a database, you create replications of the table schema, then divide what. For this month’s PGSQL Phriday blogging challenge, Tomasz Gintowt asks if people rather use partitioning or sharding to solve business problems. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture. , aggregates, joins, are pushed down to the shards. . What is Database Sharding? | Hazelcast. ago. Sharding distributes data across multiple servers, while partitioning splits tables within one server. 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. 5. Splitting your database out into shards can help reduce the. For 20+ years of database and application development, time-series data has always been at the heart of the products I work with. With sharding (in this context) being “distributed” partitioning, the essence of a successful (performant) sharded environment lies in choosing the right shard key – and by “right,” I mean one that will distribute your data across the shards in a way that will benefit most of your queries. Note: In addition to the BigQuery web UI, you can use the bq command-line tool to perform operations on BigQuery datasets. This allows for size growth and possibly performance scaling. Partitioning assumes the partitions are on the same server. Partitioning is recommended over table sharding, because partitioned tables perform better. This is known as data sharding and it can be achieved through different strategies, each with its own tradeoffs. Sharded vs. Sharding is needed if a data set is too large to be stored in a single DB. The following topics describe the sharding methods supported by Oracle Sharding: System-managed sharding is a sharding method which does not require the user to specify mapping of data to shards. 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. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Sharding is the equivalent of “horizontal partitioning. A shard is a piece of broken ceramic, glass, rock (or some other hard material) and is often sharp and dangerous. Horizontal Partitioning (Sharding) Each partition is a separate data store, but all partitions have the same schema. Splitting your data in 2 dimensions gives you even smaller data and index sizes. Other properties and other algorithms for sharding may be added in the future. A shard typically contains items that fall within a specified range determined by one or more attributes of the data. Each partition is known as a shard and holds a specific subset of the data, such as all the orders for a specific set of customers in an e-commerce application. g for large database that cannot fit on a single disk. sharding in PostgreSQL. It evolves out of horizontal partitioning in which you separate the rows of one table into multiple different tables, known as partitions. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss two methods for splitting databases into parts to manage them efficiently:. As I understand the strategy Cosmos DB use is partitioning with partition keys, but since we use the MongoDB. We can partition a table based on a date, by the hour, or integers with a fixed range. . Multiple instances contain the same data. However, in case of Partitioning, the data is stored on a single machine and managed by different database servers running on the same machine. It results in scanning less data per query, and pruning is determined before query start time. The machinery used behind the scenes implies defining an exchange that will partition, or shard messages across queues. This initial. To horizontally partition our example table, we might place the first 500 rows on the first partition and the rest of the rows on the second, like so:We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Union views might provide the full original table view. There are two typical strategies for partitioning data. Each DocumentDB account also enforces its own access control. It is popular in distributed database. It can also affect the rate at which shards have to be added or removed, or that data must be repartitioned across shards. Each partition has the same schema and columns, but also entirely different rows. Sharding is a way to split data in a distributed database system. Unlike Sharding and Replication, Partitioning is vertical scaling because each data partition is in the same. Another resource is a bottleneck and you need to shard data. Choosing a partition key is an important decision that affects your application's performance. When you create a table, the initial status of the table is CREATING . Horizontal partitioning or sharding. Data partitioning, also known as data sharding or data segmentation, is the process of dividing a large dataset into smaller, more manageable subsets called partitions or shards. You can use numInitialChunks option to specify a different number of initial chunks. Conclusion. Each node in the cluster owns not only the data within an assigned token range but also the replica for a different range of data. "Partitioning" splits up the data, but only within a single server; it does not appear that there is any advantage for your use case. A distributed SQL database needs to automatically partition the data in a table and distribute it across nodes. In this diagram, the same colors are used on both sides of the diagram to depict data for each of the 5 tenants (green for tenant1, blue for tenant2, yellow for tenant3, grey for tenant4, orange for. If you’ve used Google or YouTube, you’ve probably accessed sharded data. The consumers need some sort of ordering guarantee. Horizontal partitioning or sharding. Hash-based Sharding. There are multiple versions of partitions. Sharding vs. The following example is employee name data that uses a shard key named "user_id": DocumentDB uses hash sharding to partition your data across underlying. In this context, "partitioning" refers to the division of rows based on their primary key, while "sharding" involves dispersing these rows across multiple key-value data stores. This will only scan one partition of the table. We leverage four primary database. . 🔹 Horizontal partitioning (often called sharding): it divides a table into multiple smaller tables. We can easily add new table/node in this approach. A single machine, or database server, can store and process only a limited amount of data. 1Also known as "index-organized table" under Oracle. Posts and articles on the Citus Blog tagged with 'sharding'. Partitioning Vs Sharding. In sharding, data is split horizontally into multiple shards. . Sharding allows you to scale out database to many servers by splitting the data among them. Link back to this blog post. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, [a] but some appear only in a single shard. Rather, you can choose to use Postgres native partitioning, or you can shard Postgres with an extension like Citus to distribute Postgres across multiple nodes—or you can use. Sharding makes it easy to generalize our data and allows for cluster computing (distributed computing). 1. Database. Sharding (also known as Data Partitioning) is the process of splitting a large dataset into many small partitions which are placed on different machines. sharding# Database partitioning deals with a single database instance, whereas sharding splits partitions (shards) across multiple database instances for scalability and availability. The most basic example would be sharding by userID across 2 shards. In the example above, using the customer ZIP. Create a shard key that has many unique values. ; Purpose: The difference is that sharding implies the data is spread across multiple computers while partitioning does not. For 20+ years of database and application development, time-series data has always been at the heart of the products I. 1. 0, a sharding key is always the object's UUID. All data fits in-memory. Here, each partition is known as a shard and holds a specific subset of the data, such as all the orders for a specific set of. We achieve horizontal scalability through sharding”. This reduces the reading of unnecessary data, and. This means that all SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE should include that column in the WHERE clause. Partitioning or Sharding at row level provide all SQL and ACID. Sharding: Partitionning over several server, allowing parallel access (of different datas as opposed to replication) and, as such, memory and cpu load. Sharding is a method for distributing a single dataset across multiple databases, which can then be stored on multiple machines. If Database sharding sounds a bit complicated, it implies partitioning an on-prem server into multiple smaller servers,. Partitioning is a rather general concept and can be applied in many contexts. The main reason to have vertical partition is when there are columns in the table that are updated more often than the rest. Horizontal scaling, also known as scale-out, refers to adding machines to share the data set and load. What is Sharding? What is Partitioning? Difference Between Sharding and Partitioning; Key Aspects Of Sharding: Key Aspects Of Partitioning: Which One Should Be Used When? Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, as for load balancing. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. To sum it up. 131. Various parts of the query e. Partitioning organizes the contents of a database table into separate autonomous units. However, in. whether Cassandra follows Horizontal partitioning (sharding) It may be clear that a shard can have multiple partitions in it. 1M rows in a table -- no problem. The replication strategy determines where replicas are stored in the cluster. Sharding and moving away from MySQL. Range Partitioning. Both the techniques split a huge data set into different chunks and store it on different database servers. Sharding is a technique to split the table up between different machines. Union views might provide the full original table view. Database sharding is a technique for horizontal scaling of databases, where the data is split across multiple database instances, or shards, to improve performance and reduce the impact of large amounts of data on a single database. Partition and clustering is key to fully maximize BigQuery performance and cost when querying over a specific data range. It's not a choice of one or the other, since the two techniques are not mutually exclusive. Data sharding is a type of horizontal partitioning, which means splitting a large table or collection into smaller chunks, called shards, based on a key or a range of values. Hash partitioning vs. We leverage four primary database systems, termed as “Backends”, “Shards”, “Bagger” and “Tracker”. In terms of latency, MySQL Cluster should have more stable latency than sharded MySQL. Jayant Chakravarti Senior Assistant Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis. Each shard (or server) acts as the. Shard by another column (eg site location), then partition by order_year; Shard by order_year and another column (eg site location), partition by order_date; If I'm going to shard tables, I definitely want to use a datetime column for partitioning so I can use wildcards to query all sharded tables. Horizontal partitioning (often called sharding). This is because they access data that is scattered throughout many block in the data segment, so unless the rows you are looking for are clustered into a small number of blocks the total cost of accessing all of those single blocks will soon. We call this a "shard", which can also live in a totally separate database. Dense. Cassandra is NOT a column oriented database. When it considers the partitioning of relational data, it usually refers to decomposing your tables either row-wise (horizontally) or column-wise (vertically). Apache Spark supports two types of partitioning “hash partitioning” and “range partitioning”. As I understand the strategy Cosmos DB use is partitioning with partition keys, but since we use the MongoDB. partitioning. If you’ve used Google or YouTube, you’ve probably accessed sharded data. range partitioning in Apache Spark. Version 10 of PostgreSQL added the declarative table partitioning feature. For true sharding then Skype's pl/proxy is probably the best. Partitioning vs shards: Partitioning and sharding are similar techniques used to divide large datasets into smaller, more manageable subsets. Horizontal partitioning and sharding. Sharding is performed by exchanges, that is, messages will be partitioned across "shard" queues by one exchange that we should define as sharded. Mỗi partitions có cùng schema và cột, nhưng cũng có các hàng hoàn toàn khác nhau. It is responsible for serving a portion of the overall workload. For example, you can. As aggregation query will always be on time range than it will go to multiple shards/ partitions always. Sharding is needed if a data set is too large to be stored in a single DB. Partitioning and Sharding in PostgreSQL are good features. This architecture innovation was originally driven by internet giants that run. We leverage four primary database systems, termed as “Backends”, “Shards”, “Bagger” and “Tracker”. g. Skip to topicsIf, however, Alice that resides on shard #1 wants to send money to Bob who resides on shard #2, neither validators on shard #1(they won’t be able to credit Bob’s account) nor the validators on. For a horizontal partitioning (sharding) tutorial, see Getting started with elastic query for horizontal partitioning (sharding). Used for "High Availability" (HA). Or you want a separate backup machine. . Hyperscale computing is a computing architecture that can scale up or down quickly to meet increased demand on the system. . Just to recap, sharding in database is the ability to horizontally partition the data across one more database shards. Database Sharding vs Database Partition The terms "sharding" and "partitioning" get thrown around a lot when talking about databases. As your data grows in size, the database will continue to. In this case, the records for stores with store IDs under 2000 are placed in one shard. It's not necessary to understand these. How are we going to handle huge amount of traffic in future? For this month’s PGSQL Phriday #011, Tomasz asked us to think about PostgreSQL partitioning vs. Method 2: yes, the reason for having a background process break/merge/load balancing them. Declarative Partitioning #. Partitioning or sharding during data extraction requires some best practices to be followed. Also if a database is partitioned, it does not imply that the database is definitely sharded. Sharding is the process of splitting a database into multiple smaller and independent databases, called shards, that share the same schema but store different subsets of data. 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 declaration includes the partitioning method as described above, plus a list of columns or expressions to be used as the partition key. Method 1: Yes the reason why every shard has to be checked. remy_porter • 6 mo. Central to this strategy is database partitioning — serving as the backbone of today’s distributed database systems. The key differences are that partitioning occurs on the same server and is supported by MySQL natively, whereas sharding a. Each partition is a separate data store, but all of them have the same schema. This makes it possible for parallell resolution of queries. One of the primary differences between sharding and partitioning is how they distribute data. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. An important point when you are using Sharding is to choose a good shard key that distributes the data between the nodes in the best way. 131. The policy triggers an additional background process that takes place after the creation of extents, following data ingestion. You put different rows into different tables, the structure of the original table stays the same in the new. I'm trying to determine the best size for partitioning my biggest tables on Postgresql 12. Both are methods of breaking a large dataset into smaller subsets – but there are differences. The following topics describe the physical organization of a sharded database: Sharding as Distributed Partitioning. The word “Shard” means “a small part of a whole“. Announce your blog post on one or more of these platforms: Twitter/Linkedin/FB using the #. Database sharding is a technique for horizontally partitioning a large database into smaller and. It's not necessary to understand these. People often get confused between partitioning and sharding. This month’s PGSQL Phriday invitation from Tomasz Gintowt is on the topic of “Partitioning vs sharding in PostgreSQL“. For others, tools and middleware are available to assist in sharding. There is no way to perform consistent hashing because there is no way to obtain a consistent list, except by fiat. By reducing the. Vertical partitioning was somewhat useful in MyISAM, but rarely useful in InnoDB, since that engine automatically does such. It is a range-based sharding. Assuming that we have our data partitioned by the date, we can split that data into multiple nodes. What is Sharding? What is Partitioning? Difference Between Sharding and Partitioning; Key Aspects Of Sharding: Key. Sharding is a specific type of partitioning in which dat. –The question of partitioning vs. sharding. Partition keys are Unicode strings, with a maximum length limit of 256 characters for each key. A sharding key is an attribute or column that determines how the data is distributed among the shards. Replication can be simply understood as the duplication of the data-set whereas sharding is partitioning the data-set into discrete parts. In this video, we dive into the topic of Database Sharding vs Partitioning and break down the key differences between the two. Sharding is a database architecture pattern. A good shard key will evenly partition your data across the underlying shards, giving your workload the best throughput and performance. Partitioning is a generic term used for dividing a large database table into multiple smaller parts. While the declarative partitioning feature allows users to partition tables into multiple partitioned tables living on the same database server, sharding allows tables. 1 Partitioning vs. Each shard holds a subset of the data, and no shard has. This is not a new challenge; organizations have faced it for years, and horizontal sharding is one of the key patterns for solving it. It allows you to define a combination of sharded tables and unsharded tables. Both concepts are integral components of the same methodology for achieving horizontal scalability. This means that if we partition by the order_date, we cannot. This will in some cases make it possible to increase the performance by adding more hardware, especially for. Data in each shard does not have to share resources such as CPU or memory, and can be read or written in parallel. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Database partitioning vs. Add parallelism so FDW requests can be issued in parallel. This technique supports horizontal scaling but can be. Now that I'm looking at the data I gathered, I'm asking my self if choosing. Every distributed table has exactly one shard key. Step 1: Analyze scenario query and data distribution to find sharding key and sharding algorithm. "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. 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. Horizontal Partitioning/Sharding. For example, if a clustered index has four partitions, there are four B-tree structures; one in each partition. 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. “Horizontal partitioning”, or sharding, is replicating the schema, and then dividing the data based on a shard key. As of v1. Big Data: Partitioning vs Sharding Adjust Here at Adjust we use both. Redis Cluster data sharding. However, it does have a drawback with aggregating data across the multiple databases. It is essential to choose a sharding key that balances the load and distributes the data. Each shard contains a subset of the data and can be processed independently. Partitioning is dividing large tables into multiple tables. Ta có 3 cách thức Sharding dữ liệu như sau: Horizontal sharding. There are so many approaches in the PostgreSQL community around how to effectively and efficiently keep data light and accessible, including different approaches in various PostgreSQL extensions and database-related projects. This tool runs as an Azure web service, and migrates data safely between shards. ; Vertical partitioning. Distributed. Distributed. In MySQL, the term “partitioning” applies to individual tables of a database. Instead, the SolrCloud feature of the. Such databases don’t have traditional rows and columns, and so it is interesting to learn how they implement partitioning. So we decided to do shard our db into multiple instances. partitioning. There are very few cases where performance is enhanced by such. entity id, the same approach applies. This Distributed SQL Tips & Tricks post looks at partitioning vs sharding, scaling limitations in RocksDB. Sharding (Horizontal Partitioning)— A type of horizontal partitioning that splits large databases into smaller components, which are faster and easier to manage. Such databases don’t have traditional rows and columns, and so it is interesting to learn how they implement partitioning. This is particularly the case when it comes to heavy write contention, database locking and heavy queries. When partitioning a table, you need to consider having enough data for each partition. Example can be the posts counter. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. Database sharding is a type of horizontal partitioning that splits large databases into smaller components, which are faster and easier to manage. 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. For MySQL, Sharding, not partitioning, involves putting different rows on different physical servers. Partitioning vs. Sharding Keys ("Partitioning Keys") Weaviate uses specific characteristics of an object to decide which shard it belongs to. BTW, Oracle cluster is different thing from Oracle index-organized table. Sharding and partitioning are cornerstone techniques in modern database architectures.