Sharding is necessary if a dataset is too large to be stored in a single database. Moreover, many sharding strategies allow additional machines to be added. Sharding allows a database cluster to scale along with its data and traffic growth. Sharding is also referred as horizontal partitioning.

What databases support sharding?

Cassandra, HBase, HDFS, MongoDB and Redis are databases that support sharding. Sqlite, Memcached, Zookeeper, MySQL and PostgreSQL are databases that don't natively support sharding at the database layer.

Is sharding used in NoSQL?

Sharding is a partitioning pattern for the NoSQL age. It's a partitioning pattern that places each partition in potentially separate servers—potentially all over the world. ... A shard is managed by a single server. Based on the replication schema, the shard is most likely replicated twice on other shards.