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Database Sharding White Paper

Cost-effective
Database Scalability using
Database Sharding

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

Cost-effective Database Scalability Using Database Sharding (July 2008)


Docutment version: 1.0
Copyright 2008 CodeFutures Corporation, including this documentation, all
demonstrations, and all software. All rights reserved. The document is not intended for
production and is furnished as is without warranty of any kind. All warranties on this
document are hereby disclaimed including the warranties of merchantability and fitness
for a particular purpose.

CODEFUTURES, FIRESTORM/DAO, AND DBSHARDS ARE TRADEMARKS OF CODEFUTURES


CORPORATION
JAVA AND ALL JAVA-BASED MARKS ARE TRADEMARKS OR REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF SUN
MICROSYSTEMS, INC. IN THE U.S. AND OTHER COUNTRIES.
OTHER COMPANY, PRODUCT, AND SERVICE NAMES MENTIONED IN THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE
TRADEMARKS OR SERVICE MARKS OF OTHERS.

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Database Sharding White Paper

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Database Sharding is an enabling technology for achieving high levels of
scalability in transactional database applications. Google is credited with inventing
the sharding terminology, although Database Sharding has also been successfully
implemented by many other high profile online service providers such as Amazon
and eBay. Many Database Sharding implementations take advantage of open
source databases deployed on commodity multi-core server hardware, which
results in the most cost-effective method of achieving database application
scalability.
There are many techniques and approaches for accomplishing Database Sharding,
as well as a number of factors that a successful implementation must consider.
This paper explores the various alternatives and issues, providing a foundational
understanding of the important concepts vital for architects, developers and
system administrators considering a Database Sharding implementation.

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

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Database Sharding White Paper

CONTENTS
1

THE RISE OF DATABASE SHARDING ....................................................... 1

WHAT DRIVES THE NEED FOR DATABASE SHARDING?.............................. 2

DATABASE PARTIONING OPTIONS .......................................................... 4

DATABASE SHARDING, THE SHARED-NOTHING APPROACH..................... 6

PRACTICALITIES OF DATABASE SHARDING ............................................. 8

5.1

DATABASE SHARDING CHALLANGES ................................................ 8

5.2

WHEN DATABASE SHARDING IS APPROPRIATE................................ 10

CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 13

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

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Database Sharding White Paper

1 THE RISE OF DATABASE SHARDING


The concept of Database Sharding has been gaining popularity over the past
several years, due to the enormous growth in transaction volume and size of
business application databases. This is particularly true for many successful online
service providers, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, and social networking
Web sites.
Database Sharding can be simply defined as a shared-nothing partitioning
scheme for large databases across a number of servers, enabling new levels of
database performance and scalability achievable. If you think of broken glass,
you can get the concept of sharding breaking your database down into smaller
chunks called shards and spreading those across a number of distributed
servers.
The term sharding was coined by Google engineers, and popularized through
their publication of the Big Table1 architecture. However, the concept of sharednothing database partitioning has been around for a decade or more and there
have been many implementations over this period, especially high profile inhouse built solutions by some famous online service providers such as eBay,
Amazon, Digg, Flickr, Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Friendster, and Wikipedia.
The focus of this paper is on the need for Database Sharding, the options
available for database partitioning, and the key considerations for a successful
sharding implementation.

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean,
et.al. of Google, Inc.
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Database Sharding White Paper

2 WHAT DRIVES THE NEED FOR


DATABASE SHARDING?
Database Sharding is a highly scalable approach for improving the throughput
and overall performance of high-transaction, large database-centric business
applications. Since the inception of the relational database, application engineers
and architects have required ever-increasing performance and capacity, based on
the simple observation that business databases generally grow in size over time.
Adding to this general trend is the extreme expansion of business data due to the
evolution of the Internet economy, the Information Age, and the prevalence of
high-volume electronic commerce.
As any experienced database administrator or application developer knows all too
well, it is axiomatic that as the size and transaction volume of the database tier
incurs linear growth, response times tend to grow logarithmically. This is shown
in the following diagram:

Figure 1. The growth in database transactions and volumes has a large impact on response
times.
The reasons for the performance and scalability challenges are inherent to the
fundamental design of the database management systems themselves.
Databases rely heavily on the primary three components of any computer:
-

CPU

Memory

Disk

Through benchmark tests that we have performed, we know that each of these
elements on a single server can only scale to a given point, and then other
measures must be taken. While it is clear that disk I/O is the primary bottleneck,
as database management systems have improved they also continue to take
greater advantage of CPU and memory. In fact, we have observed that it is the
matching of these three factors that determines maximum performance. In other

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

words, you cannot add an unlimited number of CPUs (or processing cores) and
see a commensurate increase in performance without also improving the memory
capacity and performance of the disk drive subsystem. It is also common to see a
diminishing return as resources are added to a single database server. These
factors are especially true in mixed-use business transaction systems; systems
that perform a high volume of read and write transactions, as well as supporting
generalized business reporting tasks.
Therefore, as business applications gain sophistication and continue to grow in
demand, architects, developers and database administrators have been presented
with a constant challenge of maintaining database performance for mission
critical systems. This landscape drives the need for Database Sharding.

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

3 DATABASE PARTIONING OPTIONS


It has long been known that database partitioning is the answer to improving the
performance and scalability of relational databases. Many techniques have been
evolved, including:
-

Master/Slave: This is the simplest option used by many organizations,


with a single Master server for all write (Create Update or Delete, or
CRUD) operations, and one or many additional Slave servers that provide
read-only operations. The Master uses standard, near-real-time database
replication to each of the Slave servers. The Master/Slave model can
speed overall performance to a point, allowing read-intensive processing
to be offloaded to the Slave servers, but there are several limitations with
this approach:
o

The single Master server for writes is a clear limit to scalability, and
can quickly create a bottleneck.

The Master/Slave replication mechanism is near-real-time,


meaning that the Slave servers are not guaranteed to have a
current picture of the data that is in the Master. While this is fine
for some applications, if your applications require an up-to-date
view, this approach is unacceptable.

Many organizations use the Master/Slave approach for highavailability as well, but it suffers from this same limitation given
that the Slave servers are not necessarily current with the Master.
If a catastrophic failure of the Master server occurs, any
transactions that are pending for replication will be lost, a situation
that is highly unacceptable for most business transaction
applications.

Cluster Computing: Cluster computing utilizes many servers operating in


a group, with shared messaging between the nodes of the cluster. Most
often this scenario relies on a centralized shared disk facility, typically a
Storage Area Network (SAN). Each node in the cluster runs a single
instance of the database server, operating in various modes:
o

For high-availability, many nodes in the cluster can be used for


reads, but only one for write (CRUD) operations. This can make
reads faster, but write transactions do not see any benefit. If a
failure of one node occurs, then another node in the cluster takes
over, again continuing to operating against the shared disk facility.
This approach has limited scalability due to the single bottleneck for
CRUD operations. Even the reads will ultimately hit a performance
limit as the centralized shared disk facility can only spread the load
so much before diminishing returns are experienced. The read
limitations are particularly evident when an application requires
complex joins or contains non-optimized SQL statements.

More advanced clustering techniques rely on real-time memory


replication between nodes, keeping the memory image of nodes in
the cluster up to date via a real-time messaging system. This
allows each node to operate in both read or write mode, but is

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

ultimately limited by the amount of traffic that can be transmitted


between nodes (using a typical network or other high-speed
communication mechanism). Therefore, as nodes are added, the
communication and memory replication overhead increases
geometrically, thus hitting severe scalability limits, often with a
relatively small number of nodes. This solution also suffers from
the same shared disk limitations of a traditional cluster, given that
a growing, single large database has increasingly intensive disk
I/O.
-

Table Partitioning: Many database management systems support table


partitioning, where data in a single large table can be split across multiple
disks for improved disk I/O utilization. The partitioning is typically done
horizontally (separating rows by range across disk partitions), but can be
vertical in some systems as well (placing different columns on separate
partitions). This approach can help reduce the disk I/O bottleneck for a
given table, but can often make joins and other operations slower.
Further, since the approach relies on a single server instance of the
database management system, all other CPU and memory contention
limitations apply, further limiting scalability.

Federated Tables: An offshoot of Table Partitioning is the Federated


Table approach, where tables can be accessed across multiple servers.
This approach is necessarily highly complex to administer, and lacks
efficiency as the federated tables must be accessed over the network. This
approach may work for some reporting or analytical tasks, but for general
read/write transactions it is not a very likely choice.

The common drawback with each of these approaches is the reliance on shared
facilities and resources. Whether relying on shared memory, centralized disk, or
processor capacity they each suffer with scalability limitations, not to mention
many other drawbacks, including complex administration, lack of support for
critical business requirements, and high availability limitations.

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

4 DATABASE SHARDING, THE SHAREDNOTHING APPROACH


Database Sharding provides a method for scalability across independent servers,
each with their own CPU, memory and disk. Contrasted with other traditional
methods of achieving greater database performance, it does not suffer from
many of the typical limitations posed by these other approaches. The concept of a
shared-nothing database implementation has been under research or discussion
for 15+ years, but it appears that the business application market is just now
finding the more general need for such capability due to the exponential increase
in data volumes over the past several years.
The basic concept of Database Sharding is very straightforward: take a large
database, and break it into a number of smaller databases across servers. The
concept is illustrated in the following diagram:

Figure 2. Database Sharding takes large databases and breaks them down into smaller
databases.
The obvious advantage of the shared-nothing Database Sharding approach is
improved scalability, growing in a near-linear fashion as more servers are added
to the network. However, there are several other advantages of smaller
databases, which should not be overlooked when considering a sharding solution:
-

Smaller databases are easier to manage. Production databases must be


fully managed for regular backups, database optimization and other
common tasks. With a single large database these routine tasks can be
very difficult to accomplish, if only in terms of the time window required
for completion. Routine table and index optimizations can stretch to hours
or days, in some cases making regular maintenance infeasible. By using
the sharding approach, each individual shard can be maintained
independently, providing a far more manageable scenario, performing
such maintenance tasks in parallel.

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

Smaller databases are faster. The scalability of sharding is apparent,


achieved through the distribution of processing across multiple shards and
servers in the network. What is less apparent is the fact that each
individual shard database will outperform a single large database due to
its smaller size. By hosting each shard database on its own server, the
ratio between memory and data on disk is greatly improved, thereby
reducing disk I/O. This results in less contention for resources, greater join
performance, faster index searches, and fewer database locks. Therefore,
not only can a sharded system scale to new levels of capacity, individual
transaction performance is benefited as well.

Database Sharding can reduce costs. Most Database Sharding


implementations take advantage of lower-cost open source databases, or
can even take advantage of workgroup versions of commercial
databases. Additionally, sharding works well with commodity multi-core
server hardware, far less expensive than high-end multi-CPU servers and
expensive SANs. The overall reduction in cost due to savings in license
fees, software maintenance and hardware investment is substantial, in
some cases 70% or more when compared to other solutions.

There is no doubt that Database Sharding is a viable solution for many


organizations, supported by the number of large online vendors and SaaS
organizations that have implemented the technology (giants such as Amazon,
eBay, and of course Google).

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

5 PRACTICALITIES OF DATABASE
SHARDING
If Database Sharding is highly scalable, less costly, and improves performance,
why hasnt adoption of the technology been more widespread? Is it feasible for
your organization?
The reality is that Database Sharding is a very useful technology, but like other
approaches, there are many factors to consider that ensure a successful
implementation. Further, there are some limitations and Database Sharding will
not work well for every type of business application. This chapter discusses these
critical considerations and how they can be addressed.

5.1 DATABASE SHARDING CHALLANGES


Due to the distributed nature of individual databases, a number of key elements
must be taken into account:
-

Reliability. First and foremost, any production business application must


be reliable and fault-tolerant, and cannot be subject to frequent outages.
The database tier is often the single most critical element in any reliability
design, and therefore an implementation of Database Sharding is no
exception. In fact, due to the distributed nature of multiple shard
databases, the criticality of a well-designed approach is even greater. To
ensure a fault-tolerant and reliable approach, the following items are
required:
o

Automated backups of individual shards.

Shard redundancy, ensuring at least 2 live copies of each shard


are available in the event of an outage or server failure. This
requires a high-performance, efficient, and reliable replication
mechanism.

Cost-effective hardware redundancy, both within and across


servers.

Automated failover when an outage or server failure occurs.

Disaster Recovery site management.

Distributed queries. Many types of queries can be processed far faster


using distributed queries, performing parallel processing of interim results
on each shard server. This technique can achieve order-of-magnitude
improvements in performance, in many cases 10X or more. To enable
distributed queries in a seamless manner for the application, it is
important to have a facility that can process a segment of the query on
each individual shard, and then consolidate the results into a single result
set for the application tier. Common queries that can benefit from
distributed processing are:
o

Aggregation of statistics, requiring a broad sweep of data across


the entire system. Such an example is the computation of sales by

Copyright 2003-2008 CodeFutures Corporation

Database Sharding White Paper

product, which ordinarily requires evaluation of the entire


database.
o

Queries that support comprehensive reports, such as listings of all


individual customers that purchased a given product in the last
day, week or month.

Avoidance of cross-shard joins. In a sharded system, queries or other


statements that use inner-joins that span shards are highly inefficient and
difficult to perform. In the majority of cases, it has been found that such
inner-joins are not actually required by an application, so long as the
correct techniques are applied. The primary technique is the replication of
Global Tables, the relatively static lookup tables that are common utilized
when joining to much larger primary tables. Tables containing values as
Status Codes, Countries, Types, and even Products fall into this category.
What is required is an automated replication mechanism that ensures
values for Global Tables are in synch across all shards, minimizing or
eliminating the need for cross-shard joins.

Auto-increment key management. Typical auto-increment functionality


provided by database management systems generate a sequential key for
each new row inserted into the database. This is fine for a single database
application, but when using Database Sharding, keys must be managed
across all shards in a coordinated fashion. The requirement here is to
provide a seamless, automated method of key generation to the
application, one that operates across all shards, ensuring that keys are
unique across the entire system.

Support for multiple Shard Schemes. It is important to note that Database


Sharding is effective because it offers an application specific technique for
massive scalability and performance improvements. In fact it can be said
that the degree of effectiveness is directly related to how well the sharding
algorithms themselves are tailored to the application problem at hand.
What is required is a set of multiple, flexible shard schemes, each
designed to address a specific type of application problem. Each scheme
has inherent performance and/or application characteristics and
advantages when applied to a specific problem domain. In fact, using the
wrong shard scheme can actually inhibit performance and the very results
you are trying to obtain. It is also not uncommon for a single application
to use more than one shard scheme, each applied to a specific portion of
the application to achieve optimum results. Here is a list of some common
shard schemes:
o

Session-based sharding, where each individual user or process


interacts with a specific shard for the duration of the user or
process session. This is the simplest technique to implement, and
adds virtually zero overhead to overall performance, since the
sharding decision is made only once per session. Applications which
can benefit from this approach are often customer-centric, where
all data for a given customer is contained in a single shard, and
that is all the data that the customer requires.

Transaction-based sharding determines the shard by examining the


first SQL Statement in a given database transaction. This is

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Database Sharding White Paper

normally done by evaluating the shard key value used in the


statement (such as an Order Number), and then directing all other
statements in the transaction to the same shard.
o

Statement-based sharding is the most process intensive of all


types, evaluating each individual SQL Statement to determine the
appropriate shard to direct it to. Again, evaluation of the shard key
value is required. This option is often desirable on high-volume,
granular transactions, such as recording phone call records.

Determine the optimum method for sharding the data. This is another area
that is highly variable, change from application to application. It is closely
tied with the selection of the Shard Scheme described above. There are
numerous methods for deciding how to shard your data, and its important
to understand your transaction rates, table volumes, key distribution, and
other characteristics of your application. This data is required to determine
the optimum sharding strategy:
o

Shard by a primary key on a table. This is the most straightforward


option, and easiest to map to a given application. However, this is
only effective if your data is reasonably well distributed. For
example, if you elected to shard by Customer ID (and this is a
sequential numeric value), and most of your transactions are for
new customers, very little if anything will be gained by sharding
your database. On the other hand, if you can select a key that does
adequately and naturally distribute your transactions, great
benefits can be realized.

Shard by the modulus of a key value. This option works in a vast


number of cases, by applying the modulus function to the key
value, and distributing transactions based on the calculated value.
In essence you can predetermine any number of shards, and the
modulus function effectively distributes across your shards on a
round-robin basis, creating a very even distribution of new key
values.

Maintain a master shard index table. This technique involves using


a single master table that maps various values to specific shards. It
is very flexible, and meets a wide variety of application situations.
However, this option often delivers lower performance as it requires
an extra lookup for each sharded SQL Statement.

As you can see, there are many things to consider and many capabilities required
in order to ensure that a Database Sharding implementation is successful and
effective, delivering on its objectives of providing new levels of scalability and
performance in a cost-effective manner.

5.2 WHEN DATABASE SHARDING IS APPROPRIATE


Database Sharding is an excellent fit for many types of business applications,
those with general purpose database requirements. It can also be used effectively
for Data Warehousing applications, and as there are many available products and
technologies to accomplish this, we will not focus on this element here.
The general purpose database requirements that are a fit for sharding include:

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Database Sharding White Paper

High-transaction database applications

Mixed workload database usage

Frequent reads, including complex queries and joins

Write-intensive transactions (CRUD statements, including INSERT,


UPDATE, DELETE)

Contention for common tables and/or rows

General Business Reporting


o

Typical repeating segment report generation

Some data analysis (mixed with other workloads)

To determine if Database Sharding is applicable to your specific application or


environment, the most important thing to evaluate is how well your database
schema lends itself to sharding. In essence, Database Sharding is a method of
horizontal portioning, meaning that database rows (as opposed to columns) for
a single schema table are distributed across multiple shards. To understand the
characteristics of how well sharding fits a given situation, here are the important
things to determine:
-

Identify all transaction-intensive tables in your schema.

Determine the transaction volume your database is currently handling (or


is expected to handle).

Identify all common SQL statements (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE),


and the volumes associated with each.

Develop an understanding of your table hierarchy contained in your


schema; in other words the main parent-child relationships.

Determine the key distribution for transactions on high-volume tables, to


determine if they are evenly spread or are concentrated in narrow ranges.

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Database Sharding White Paper

With this information, you can rapidly gain an assessment of the value and
applicability of sharding to your application. As an example, here is a simple
Bookstore schema showing how the data can be sharded:

Figure 3. Example Bookstore schema showing how data is sharded.


In the Bookstore example, the Primary Shard Table is the customer entity. This
is the table that is used to shard the data. The customer table is the parent of
the shard hierarchy, with the customer_order and order_item entities as child
tables. The data is sharded by the customer.id attribute, and all related rows in
the child tables associated with a given customer.id are sharded as well. The
Global Tables are the common lookup tables, which have relatively low activity,
and these tables are replicated to all shards to avoid cross-shard joins.
While this example is very basic, it does provide the basic considerations for
determining how to shard a given database application. By using this evaluation
approach, you can determine if sharding is applicable to your particular
environment, and what benefits can be realized by implementing Database
Sharding.

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Database Sharding White Paper

6 CONCLUSION
This paper has covered an overview of Database Sharding, including a discussion
of the challenges involved, and a fundamental approach to implementing a
sharding solution. Database Sharding has been proven in many large
organizations, and may very well be applicable to your specific application
problems. When implemented properly, Database Sharding can in fact deliver on
the objective of cost-effective, near-linear scalability for high-volume business
transaction applications.

For more information about Database Sharding, or for a no-charge database


performance analysis, contact:
CodeFutures Corporation
Cynthia Smith
Business Development
cynthia.smith@codefutures.com
Office: (303) 625-4084
Direct: (940) 321-0198

About CodeFutures Corporation


CodeFutures Corporation is a leading supplier of database performance tools that
provide reduce the time and effort required to develop database applications and
dramatically increase deployed database scalability and performance.
FireStorm/DAO is a database access tool based on the Data Access Object design
pattern that makes software developers more productive by generating the Java
persistence code for accessing relational databases. FireStorm/DAO cuts
development costs through higher developer productivity, better software quality,
and lower maintenance costs.
dbShards economically scales large, high transaction volume databases using
Database Sharding, the database scalability architecture used by online services
such as eBay, YouTube, and Google. Going beyond traditional Data Warehouse
Appliances, dbShards dramatically improves the response times and scalability of
OLTP databases, online services and Software as a Service applications, and any
database application with many concurrent users all using cost-effective
commodity hardware.
CodeFutures' database products are used in hundreds of companies such as
FedEx, HSBC, T-Mobile, Lehman Brothers, General Electric, JP Morgan Chase,
Walt Disney, Wells Fargo Bank, Kraft Foods, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin,
ABN AMRO Bank, Verizon, Compass Bank, Siemens, and United Airlines.
CodeFutures Corporation is headquartered in Louisville, Colorado, with offices
near London, England.
Corporate Headquarters
CodeFutures Corporation
357 S. McCaslin Blvd., Suite 200
Louisville, CO 80027, USA
Phone: +1 303 625 4804
Fax: +1 303 460 8228

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Cost-effective Database Scalability using Database Sharding - Review


INTRODUCTION
Databases were usually up scaled by buying faster, better and more expensive hardwares. This path was feasible only
for large enterprises with big pockets while the small and medium scale enterprises did not have that kind of budget.
Sharding helped these firms manage their growing data needs. Many Database Sharding implementations take
advantage of open source databases deployed on commodity multi-core server hardware, which results in the most
cost-effective method of achieving database application scalability.

CONCEPT OF SHARDING
As the size and transaction volume of the database tier grows, the amount of user queries received by the nodes grows
at a much faster rate and as a result the response time to a query or delay also increases. The reasons for the
deteriorating performance is the reliance of Databases on the primary three components of any computer:
- CPU
- Memory
- Disk
Disk I/O is the primary bottleneck, adding an unlimited number of CPUs (or processing cores) does not result in an
equivalent increase in performance without also improving the memory capacity and performance of the disk drive
subsystem. Database Sharding provides a method for scalability across independent servers, each with their own CPU,
memory and disk de-bottlenecking the Disk I/O issue. Shard - A database shard is a horizontal partition of data in a
database. If a Database table is too large horizontal partitioning can be used whereby rows of a database table are held
separately, rather than splitting by columns (as for normalization). Each partition forms part of a shard, which may in
turn be located on a separate database server or physical location. The advantage is the number of rows in each table
is reduced (this reduces index size, thus improves search performance). Database Sharding is a highly scalable
approach for improving the throughput and overall performance of high-transaction, large database-centric business
applications.
THE SHAREDNOTHING APPROACH
The concept of a shared-nothing is breaking a large database into a number of smaller databases across servers. The
obvious advantage of the shared-nothing Database Sharding approach is improved scalability, growing in a near-linear
fashion as more servers are added to the network. Other advantages are as follows:

Smaller databases are easier to manage: By using the sharding approach, each individual shard can be
maintained independently, providing a far more manageable scenario, performing such maintenance tasks
in parallel.

Smaller databases are faster: Each individual shard database will outperform a single large database due to
its smaller size. By hosting each shard database on its own server, the ratio between memory and data on
disk is greatly improved, thereby reducing disk I/O.

Database Sharding can reduce costs: Sharding works well with commodity multi-core server hardware, far
less expensive than high-end multi-CPU servers and expensive SANs. The overall reduction in cost due to
savings in license fees, software maintenance and hardware investment is substantial, in some cases 70% or
more when compared to other solutions.

DATABASE SHARDING CHALLANGES


Following items are required for effective implementation of sharding in a database:
Automated backups of individual shards.
Shard redundancy, ensuring at least 2 live copies of each shard are available in the event of an outage or
server failure. This requires a high-performance, efficient, and reliable replication mechanism.
Cost-effective hardware redundancy, both within and across servers.
Automated failover when an outage or server failure occurs.

Disaster Recovery site management.


A facility that can process a segment of the distributed query on each individual shard, and then consolidate
the results into a single result set for the application tier.
An automated replication mechanism that ensures values for Global Tables are in synch across all shards,
minimizing or eliminating the need for cross-shard joins.
Auto-increment key management providing a seamless, automated method of key generation to the
application, one that operates across all shards, ensuring that keys are unique across the entire system.
Support for multiple Shard Schemes, a set of flexible shard schemes each designed to address a specific type
of application problem.
Selection of sharding data method closely tied with the selection of the Shard Scheme.

APPLICATION
Database Sharding is an excellent fit for many types of business applications for example Data Warehousing
applications. Sharding can be used for following database requirements:
High-transaction database applications
Mixed workload database usage
Frequent reads, including complex queries and joins
Write-intensive transactions (CRUD statements, including INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE)
Typical repeating segment report generation
Some data analysis (mixed with other workloads)

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