Monday, October 12, 2015

Sharding in Oracle 12c Database

Sharding for Oracle DBAs is still pretty much an alien or pretty new concept. In the realms of big data, this term is being used quite extensively though.

What is Sharding in simple words:

Sharding is partitioning. Horizontal partitioning to be exact.

Sharding means partitioning a table rows on basis of some criteria and storing that partitioned rows of table (i.e. a shard) on different database servers. These database servers are cheap low commodity servers.

The benefits include smaller data to manage, smaller backups, faster reads, and faster response time for the queries.

Just like existing partitioning option in the Oracle database, there are generally three kinds of sharding:

Range Sharding
List Sharding
Hash Sharding

The news out there on social media is that Oracle 12c next version is coming up with Sharding option. That is pretty exciting and let's see what they come up in this regard.


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