In this post, you’ll learn what partitioning and sharding are, why they matter, and when to use them. Oracle Globally Distributed Database can be used to store massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and to eliminate data fragmentation. We use the PARTITION BY HASH hashing function, the same as used by Postgres for declarative partitioning. To sum it up. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Technical comparison between PostgreSQL vs MySQL. Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL also has a concept similar to partitioning. 1, you will be much happier when using the shard rebalancer to balance the data sizes across the nodes in your cluster. However, without the use of extensions, the process of creating and managing partitions is still a manual process. 0. 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. It stores structured data, supports “JOINS”, and demonstrates ACID-compliance. Database Sharding vs Partitioning. 6 & 11 SQL Queries. 3. Then as you need to continue scaling you’re able to move. Let me clarify what I mean by “table”. 1 Answer. There are a number of Postgres forks that do include automatic sharding, but these often trail behind the latest PostgreSQL release and lack certain other features. MongoDB Consistency and Availability. client_encoding (this is automatically set from the local server encoding). Customer id vs. This tool runs as an Azure web service, and migrates data safely between shards. Learn as sharding and partitioning works in the YugabyteDB disseminated SQL database and how to use both correctly. So, what I would ideally request from a PostgreSQL sharding solution: Automatically keep several copies of every user's data around (on different machines). executor-based partition pruning. Last but not the least the blog will continue to emphasise the importance of this feature in the core of PostgreSQL. postgres. PostgreSQL 11 addressed various limitations that existed with the usage of partitioned tables in PostgreSQL, such as the inability to create indexes, row-level triggers, etc. The distribution mechanism involves distributing shards across. Sharding is possible with both SQL and NoSQL databases. Partitions, in terms of MySQL and PostgreSQL feature set, are physical segmentations of data. Our latest Citus open source release, Citus 12, adds a new and easy way to transparently scale your Postgres database: Schema-based sharding, where the database is transparently sharded by schema name. One day ill need to shard. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outages. Sharding physically organizes the data. On the other hand, data partitioning is when the database is. Sharding", which explains concepts of PG…This means sending a query to all nodes where the data required for the join is located. Spark and sharded JDBC datasources. Supports several relational databases, including PostgreSQL. This blog the one guide on how up Optimize Database Performance with PostgreSQL Partitioning, Organize Your Data for Faster Inquiry. The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. The con is that the tables need to be sharded on the columns involved in the join condition. Figure 1 - Horizontally partitioning (sharding) data based on a partition key. The multi-tenancy is achieved by creating individual schema for each user. Skip in content . each server contains only the data for the country its in) - so there isn't one server that would contain all the data. If you want to speed up that query as much as possible, create an index that supports both conditions:The common SQL-vs-NoSQL differences: The common SQL-vs-NoSQL differences are applicable when you compare MySQL and Cassandra. One of the big new things that the Hyperscale (Citus) option in the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service enables you to do—in addition to being able to scale out Postgres horizontally—is that you can now shard Postgres on a single Hyperscale (Citus) node. By default, the primary key in YugabyteDB is sharded using HASH. Also if a database is partitioned, it does not imply that the database is definitely sharded. Splitting your data in 2 dimensions gives you even smaller data and index sizes. Both use table inheritance to do partition. As the volume of data grows, traditional database architectures can. Our unpartitioned table ran the query in 4. Both read and write queries can be routed to the shards using this pooler. Tomasz is a new PostgreSQL friend for me and I love the topic he’s picked: Partitioning vs. Sharding implies that the data is stored across multiple computers while partitioning groups this data within a single database instance. Some PL/PgSQL to generate the SQL statements and EXECUTE them can be useful for this. Some of these databases are highly commercialized and are suitable for a broader range of scenarios. What is Sharding? 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. On the other hand, since MySQL is a proprietary software, it cannot be freely downloaded, used, or modified. For instance, PostgreSQL does not include automatic sharding as a feature, although it is possible to manually shard a PostgreSQL database. 2. Unfortunately, the terms "partitioning" and "sharding" are used at. The most basic example would be sharding by userID across 2 shards. Splitting your database out into shards can help reduce the. Add parallelism so FDW requests can be issued in parallel. Sharding spreads the load over more computers, which reduces contention and improves performance. Announce your blog post on one or more of these platforms: Twitter/Linkedin/FB using the #. I thought this might make the query. Implement a sharding-only multi-tenant application. With Citus, you extend your PostgreSQL database with new superpowers:. The partitioned table itself is a “ virtual ” table having no storage of its. To sum it up. Sharding involves dividing a large dataset horizontally, creating smaller and independent subsets known as shards. Hazelcast named in the Gartner ® Market Guide for Event Stream Processing. Unlike single-node systems like PostgreSQL, distributed SQL operates on a cluster of nodes. g. Database replication, partitioning and clustering are concepts related to sharding. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. "Critical reads" need to go to the Master, too. The pgvector extension adds an open-source vector similarity search to PostgreSQL. IBM DB2 was developed by IBM in 1983. 392 Create unique constraint with null columns. The declaration includes the partitioning method as described above, plus a list of columns or expressions to be used as the partition key. Database sharding is the process of storing a large database across multiple machines. Learn about Light PostgreSQL partializing and sharding, with insights to how to speed up and optimize database query performance. Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL uses algorithmic sharding to assign rows to shards. Sharding is necessary as the number of records in the relationship table can easily exceed the storage space of any drive. To enable the pg_partman extension for a specific database, create the partition maintenance schema and then create the. events', 'created_at', 'time', 'daily'); After invoking this command, pg_partman creates a number of control tables and. For me this was one of the most confusing aspects of learning this stuff because they are often used interchangeably and there is a certain amount of overlap between the terms. Shard. Even if 1 server containing the data we need fails, our. The reason for this is reliability. Some databases have out-of-the-box support for sharding. 5. Sharding is a way to split data in a distributed database system. In vertical partitioning, we divide column-wise and in horizontal partitioning, we divide row-wise. If both are present, postgres_fdw. You can also use PostgreSQL partitions to divide indexes and indexed tables. 878 seconds, a difference of 1. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, [a] but some appear only in a single shard. There are two main ways to scale data storage, especially databases, and the resources available to store and process that data. To stop the PostgreSQL cluster, use the. . CREATE FOREIGN TABLE shardschema. 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. You can implement sharding by the Citus PostgreSQL extension (Citus Data, the company behind it, was acquired by Microsoft in 2019). In Postgres, partitioning refers to splitting up a table into smaller tables on the same machine, while sharding means splitting up the table into smaller tables on different machines. But if a database is sharded, it implies that the database has definitely been partitioned. Primary key also need to be extended with journal_id field additionally to seq_id. The hard part will be moving the data without eexcessive downtime. Oracle Database is a converged database. shardID = identifier % numShards. May 22, 2018. Let’s add 2 more Citus worker nodes and scale out the database:As of this writing, native PostgreSQL partitioning handles table inheritance (table structure, indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, constraints, and so on) efficiently from major version 11 and higher. Both are methods of breaking a large dataset into smaller subsets – but there are differences. The partitioning feature in PostgreSQL was first added by PG 8. Partitioning Techniques in PostgreSQL. A shard is essentially a horizontal data partition that contains a subset of the total data set, and hence is responsible for serving a portion of the overall workload. Haas. To enable the pg_partman extension for a specific database, create the partition maintenance schema and then create the. 1174 Getting error: Peer authentication failed for user "postgres", when trying to get pgsql working with rails. The capabilities already added are. A SQL table is decomposed into multiple sets of rows according to a specific sharding strategy. PostgreSQL provides the concept of Referential Integrity and have Foreign keys. Enabling the pg_partman extension. 1. This tool runs as an Azure web service, and migrates data safely between shards. Assuming you're talking about table partitioning and the CLUSTER command: You can CLUSTER a partitioned table, but it'll only affect the parent table. Citus Sharding and PostgreSQL table partitioning on the same column. Does PostgreSQL database sharding (by partitioning) reduce CPU. ScalabilityIf you want to filter rows where this date is equal to a value then you can do a partition full table scan to read all of the partition that houses this data with a full scan. Email us at postgres@heroku. . Email us at postgres@heroku. Data sharding helps in scalability and geo-distribution by horizontally partitioning data. I presented at Percona University São Paulo about the new features in PostgreSQL that allow the deployment of simple shards. g. Sharding is also referred to as horizontal partitioning. These tables are then grouped together through a parent. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. First introduced in PostgreSQL 10, partitioned tables enable a single table to be broken into multiple child tables so that these child tables can be stored on separate disks. To enable. You can partition your data using 2 main strategies: on the one hand you can use a table column, and on the other, you can use the data time of ingestion. Both read and write queries can be routed to the shards using this pooler. Secondary replicas can handle read operations, which helps to distribute the read workload and increase performance. Reload to refresh your session. However, a sharding key cannot be a. A bucket could be a table, a postgres schema, or a different physical database. Partitioning is a way to split data within each shard into non-overlapping partitions for further parallel handling. Also if a database is partitioned, it does not imply that the database is definitely sharded. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. MSSQL PostgreSQL. 1Also known as "index-organized table" under Oracle. Each time-based partition could be a separate distributed table in the. What exactly are you trying to. pgDash provides core reporting and visualization functionality, including collecting. . Sharding of rows of a single table across multiple servers while presenting the unified interface of a regular table to SQL clients is perhaps the most sought-after solution to handling big tables. For 20+ years of database and application development, time-series data has always been at the heart of the products I work with. g. 4. Each time-based partition could be a separate distributed table in the. Sharding Key: A sharding key is a column of the database to be sharded. However, you can specify ASC or DSC to determine whether the partitions. If you find yourself growing quickly and needing to partition, I recommend creating a lot of partitions upfront to save yourself some trouble later on. These attributes form the shard key (sometimes referred to as the partition key). To the extent your bottleneck is in streaming realtime reads and writes, you may want to look into the open source PostgreSQL extension: pg_shard. Using the FDW-based sharding, the data is partitioned to the shards in order to optimize the query for the sharded table. A primary key can be used as a sharding key. Each of. The architecture also allows the database to scale by adding more nodes to the cluster. Citus seems to be performing better in insert as described in this video, so it seems a little odd to me that sharding will actually degrade the performance by this much. Sharding in database is the ability to horizontally partition data across one more database shards. You can see the progress being made. Database sharding and partitioning are two similar concepts that refer to dividing a database into smaller parts or chunks in order to improve its performance and scalability. Range Partition. 1 Answer. The system knows how to access the data in a seamless and transparent way. Figure 1: Sharding Postgres on a single Citus node and adopting a distributed data model from the beginning can make it easy for you to scale out your Postgres database at any time, to any scale. This allows to shard the database using Postgres partitions and place the partitions on different servers (shards). However, they are more moderate or scenario-oriented. The difference is that through its mechanism, sharding can take place in multiple database instances even in multiple computers in different regions. . 2. Sharding. partitioning. sharding in PostgreSQL. Currently postgresql offeres to shared at table level where the rows of a table are distributed across multiple nodes. In this video I explain what database partitioning is and illustrate the difference between Horizontal vs Vertical Partitioning, benefits and much more. The partitioned table itself is a “ virtual ” table having no storage of its. However this may be not the most optimal approach by itself because not all data belonging to same user is equal. I have three columns that seem like reasonable candidates for partitioning or indexing: Time (day or week, data spans a 4 month period)Shard storage Each partition of a sharded table resides in a separate tablespace, and each tablespace is associated with a specific shard. Sharding. This article explores the limitations and tradeoffs of pgvector and shows how to use partitioning, indexing and search settings to improve performance. Flagged with decentralized, sql, sharding, postgres. Replication and sharding are two widely used techniques for handling the scalability and availability of large-scale databases. Every row will be in exactly one shard, and every shard can contain multiple rows. OPTIONS (dbname 'postgres', host 'hosturl. In the above code main is the name of the PostgreSQL cluster used and 12 is the Postgres version being used. What would be the right steps for horizontal partitioning in Postgresql? 20 Auto sharding postgresql? 8 How to implement sharding? 0 Is it possible to do Sharding in PostgreSQL without any extra plugin? 1 Sharding on MySQL vs PostgreSQL. Built-in sharding is something that many people have wanted to see in PostgreSQL for a long time. Range partition holds the values within the range provided in the partitioning in PostgreSQL. To start a server, use the following command: pg_ctlcluster 12 main start. Use list partitioning to split the table in something like at most 600 partitions. department FOR VALUES FROM ('2109010000000000000') TO('2112319999999999999') server shard_13; ERROR: cannot create foreign partition of partitioned table "department" DETAIL: Table "department" contains indexes that are. You query your tables, and the database will determine the best access to your data,. If you need to scale your Postgres, your friends may recommend you look into partitioning and/or sharding. One goal of the post is to clarify the definitions of sharding and partitioning as they are often used interchangeably. Sharded vs. Sharding a table is process of splitting this table between different shards where each shards will have sharded table with the same structure but different subset of rows. My questions are , is there any good tutorials or places to learn about PostgreSQL auto sharding (I found results of firms like sykpe doing auto sharding but no tutorials, I want to play with this myself)?. Read replicas and sharding are two very different concepts. Row-based sharding. Beginner's Guide to Partitioning vs. MySQL, PostgreSQL, InnoDB, MariaDB, MongoDB. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. 1Also known as "index-organized table" under Oracle. Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL detects distributed deadlocks and cancels their queries, but the situation is less performant than avoiding deadlocks in the first place. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics. You switched accounts on another tab or window. Partitioning methods Methods for storing different data on different nodes: Sharding: partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash; Replication methods Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes: selectable replication factor: Source-replica replication other methods possible by using 3rd party extensionsIn PostgreSQL it is possible to partition your dataset, and then shard each partition onto a different database. Horizontal Partitioning involves putting different rows. Study how sharding and fragmentation works in the YugabyteDB circulated SQL database and wherewith to use both correctly. A “table” in DocDB, the distributed transaction and storage layer in YugabyteDB that stores the tablet, can be any persistent “relation” from YSQL – the PostgreSQL interface: Non-partitioned table; Non-partitioned indexWhen to use Database Sharding vs Partitioning. But if your only concern is to efficiently select all rows for a certain value of the index or. While partitioning and sharding are pretty similar in concept, the difference becomes much more apparent regarding No-SQL databases like MongoDB. Courses Traditional monolithic databases struggle to maintain optimal performance due to their single-point architecture, where a single server handles all data. PostgreSQL 10 added this feature by making it easier to partition tables. Partitioning is a rather general concept and can be applied in many contexts. PostgreSQL Keywords: Postgres, scaling, vertical scaling, non-sharding scaling, built-in shardingMoreover, bigserial fields need to be converted into regular bigints, but I still need keep sequences for each partition and manually call nextval on every insert. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. If you want to CLUSTER all the sub-tables you have to do each individually. That tool is the key to simplifying a number of tasks -- hardware upgrades, software upgrades, crash repair, load balancing, etc, etc. Introduction. PostgreSQL provides a number of foreign data wrappers (FDW’s) that are used for accessing external data sources. Greenplum Partitioning. Horizontal partitioning is achieved in a relational database by storing rows from the same table in several database nodes. Does PostgreSQL database sharding (by partitioning) reduce CPU. partitioning. Figure 1: Sales Data is split into four shards, each assigned to a query node. Sharding is a way to split data in a distributed database system. is the core principle behind sharding. Splitting your data in 2 dimensions gives you even smaller data and index sizes. For more on the extension itself, see basics of pgvector. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. Some of these databases are highly commercialized and are suitable for a broader range of scenarios. Distributed SQL is a database category that combines the familiar relational database features (found in PostgreSQL) with the scalability and availability advantages of NoSQL systems. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve had to repeatedly aid firms lock has become poor partitioning design. Create the parent table: This is the table that will hold the data for all partitions. The main difference between them is the way the distribution happens. Not all databases natively support sharding. Scaling PostgreSQL + Top 12 List. In MongoDB, a sharded cluster consists of: Shards; Mongos; Config servers ; A shard is a replica set that contains a subset of the cluster’s data. The logic behind this thinking is that if it is a large table, SQL Server has to read the entire table to get the data and if the table is smaller, the process of reading. You can also use PostgreSQL partitions to divide indexes and indexed tables. Oracle and PostgreSQL allow for table partitioning in similar ways. Microsoft, Accenture, Intuit, Stack Overflow, etc. Sharding support: No good sharding implementation (MySQL Cluster is rarely deployed due to many limitations) There are dozens of forks of Postgres which implement sharding but none of them yet haven’t been added to the community release. 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. Please note I haven’t. Stack Overflow | The World’s Largest Online Community for DevelopersA database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. This post covers 5 different data models for sharding, from sharding by tenant (multi-tenant data models), sharding by geography, sharding by entity id, sharding a graph, and time-based partitioning. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset. Sharding" recently, particularly in the context of PostgreSQL, largely due to the recent PGSQL Phriday #011 and I was surprised by the low coverage of the limitations with the most basic SQL database features: PostgreSQL comes with many features aimed to help developers build applications, administrators to protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments, and help you manage your data no matter how big or small the dataset. Let’s add 2 more Citus worker nodes and scale out the database: For more information on PostgreSQL partitioning, see Managing PostgreSQL partitions with the pg_partman extension. Let’s just mention some interesting possibilities. Standard PostgreSQL partitioning creates all partitions equal and on the same physical cluster. department_210901 PARTITION OF shardschema. Partitioning columns may be any data type that is a valid index column. Sharding là một mẫu kiến trúc cơ sở dữ liệu liên quan đến phân vùng ngang - thực tế tách một hàng bảng Bảng thành nhiều bảng khác nhau, được gọi là partitions. What are partitioning and sharding? It has been possible to do partitioning in PostgreSQL for quite a while — splitting what is logically one large table into smaller physical tables. You can use Postgres table partitioning in combination with Citus, for. PostgreSQL allows you to declare that a table is divided into partitions. When it considers the partitioning of relational data, it usually refers to decomposing your tables either row-wise (horizontally) or column-wise (vertically). MySQL user support, both database systems have helpful communities to provide support to users. In Cassandra, partitioning can be done Sharding. com In fact, PostgreSQL has implemented sharding on top of partitioning by allowing any given partition of a partitioned table to be hosted by a remote server. The query returned 1,313,997 rows of data. Then, Azure Cosmos DB allocates the key space of partition key hashes evenly across the physical partitions. When a tenant takes up more than some percent of the space on a server, move it to its own server, and add a special case to the partitioning function. An individual application's performance benefits more from client- rather than server-side pooling. Assuming you're talking about table partitioning and the CLUSTER command: You can CLUSTER a partitioned table, but it'll only affect the parent table. '5400'); //at the LOCAL database, set up a user mapping to. There are many ways to split a dataset into shards. 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. A shard is similar to a partition, as it’s also a cloned part of a large table. These individual shards are then hosted on separate servers or nodes. This would be 24 total leader tablets. g. . an index. This is the most scalable algorithm as it involves no data movement before doing the join. The declaration includes the. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres. MariaDB and PostgreSQL are open-source relational databases that store data in a tabular format. Partitioning provides very few use cases to justify its existence; sharding provides write scaling at the cost of complexity. The sharding method is selected when creating a table or index by setting your PRIMARY KEY. Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) Server is an RDBMS developed by Microsoft in 1989. A single machine, or database server, can store and process only a limited amount of data. Link back to this blog post. A table can be clustered or partitioned or both (depending on DBMS). This table will contain no data. This reduces the reading of unnecessary data, and allows for efficiently implementing data retention policies. A shard is an individual partition that exists on separate database server instance to spread load. We also have quite a few databases of all sizes. Please update the post with the table DDL, sample input data, and the expected output. MySQL, and PostgreSQL. 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. No standard sharding implementation. Join Claire Giordano on the Citus team to learn about how Citus uses the Postgres extension APIs to shard Postgres—and the best way to get started with. Partitioning is a term that refers to the process of splitting data elements into multiple entities for performance, availability, or maintainability. Whether you’re sharding by a granular uuid, or by something higher in your model hierarchy like customer id, the approach of hashing your shard key before you leverage it remains the same. However, I'm getting confused on when I'd want to create a partition vs. I like to call this being “scale-out-ready” with Citus. Fix: The maximum table size is 32TB and not 32GB. You can put different tables on different machines or you can shard one table across many machines. List Partition. SolarWinds. Partitioning provides very few use cases. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. There can be multiple copies of each logical shard spread across multiple physical instances. There are mainly two types of PostgreSQL Partitions: Vertical Partitioning and Horizontal Partitioning. If you find yourself growing quickly and needing to partition, I recommend creating a lot of partitions upfront to save yourself some trouble later on. MariaDB is better suited. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load. $ heroku pg:psql -a sushi sushi::DATABASE=> SELECT create_parent ('public. There are two main ways to scale data storage, especially databases, and the resources available to store and process that data. Mỗi partitions có cùng schema và cột, nhưng cũng có các hàng hoàn toàn khác nhau. Distributed. Azure Cosmos DB hashes the partition key value of an item. This is called table partitioning. Postgres 10 will include an overhaul of partitioning for single-node use to improve performance and enable more optimizations, e. Be able to dynamically up/down scale, by adding/removing server nodes. This improves MariaDB’s query performance and availability. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset. Due to limited support for PostgreSQL in earlier versions of ShardingSphere-Proxy, TPC-C testing could not be performed, so the comparison is made between Versions 5. A partitioning column is used by the partition function to partition the table or index. They exist within a single database instance, and are used to reduce the scope of data you're interacting with at a particular time, to cope with high data volume situations. How to replay incremental data in the new sharding cluster. And Citus is available on Azure as a managed service, too. In this post, you’ll learn what partitioning and sharding are, why they matter, and when to use them. Vertical partitioning, aka row splitting, uses the same splitting techniques as database normalization, but ususally the. Database replication, partitioning and clustering are concepts related to sharding. Native partitioning is useful, but using it becomes much more pleasant by leveraging the. Database sharding overcomes this limitation by splitting data into smaller chunks, called shards, and storing them across several database servers. I've gone through numerous publications discussing "Partitioning vs. The main difference. “Partitioning refers to splitting what is logically one large table into smaller physical pieces” — PostgreSQL. This will be used for sharding too. The table that is divided is referred to as a partitioned table. Download and run pg_top. Note: As mentioned above, sharding is a subset of partitioning where data is distributed over multiple machines. Recap on FDW based Sharding. They exist within a single database instance, and are used to reduce the scope of data you're interacting with at a particular time, to cope with high data volume situations. 1 by Simon Rigs, it has based on the concept of table inheritance and using constraint exclusion to exclude inherited tables (not needed) from. Postgres 10 will include an overhaul of partitioning for single-node use to improve performance and enable more optimizations, e. Table, index or partition in distributed SQL sharding. Alternatively, you could use sharding to partition the transaction data across multiple servers based on a sharding key like “user_id” or “transaction_date”. CREATE EXTENSION postgres_fdw; GRANT USAGE ON FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER postgres_fdw to postgres; //at the LOCAL database, set up a server configuration to wrap our EU database. That would give you a combination of read scaling, a little write scaling, and a lot of HA. Partitioning is a general term, and sharding is commonly used for horizontal partitioning to scale-out the database in a shared-nothing architecture.