Database Sharding Strategies

Horizontally partitions massive database tables across multiple physical database instances based on a carefully chosen shard key.

STAFF ENGINEER TAKEAWAY: Choose your shard key around your most critical query access pattern; bad shard keys create hot shards (e.g. sharding by date or celebrity user_id) that overwhelm single nodes.

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More Topics in 3. Data & Storage

🗄️SQL Relational vs NoSQL Engines

SQL databases enforce structured schemas and ACID transactions with relations. NoSQL systems optimize for flexible schemas, horizontal partition scale, and eventual consistency.

🌲B-Tree & B+Tree Indexing

Self-balancing search tree data structure that keeps data sorted and allows searches, sequential access, insertions, and deletions in logarithmic O(log N) time.

🏛️ACID Transactions & Isolation Levels

Guarantees Atomicity (all-or-nothing), Consistency (rules preserved), Isolation (concurrent safety), and Durability (WAL commits survive power loss).

🔺CAP Theorem (Consistency vs Availability)

In any distributed data store, network partitions (P) are inevitable. When a partition occurs, the system must choose between Consistency (CP) or Availability (AP).