The concept of database sharding has gained 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 vendors, software-as-a-service companies and social networking website.

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. If you think of broken glass, you can get the concept of sharding-breaking your database down into smaller chunks called "shards" and spreading them across a number of distributed servers.

Read more in the August e-edition of Database Trends and Applications.

To stay on top of all the trends, subscribe to Database Trends and Applications magazine.