- A horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance in order to spread load. Some data within a database remains present in all shards, but other appears only in a single shard. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset of data. Horizontal partitioning is a database design principle whereby rows of a database table are held separately, rather than being split into columns (which is what normalization and vertical partitioning do, to differing extents). ← Wikipedia
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