DynamoDB Applied Design Patterns

Item sharding

Sharding, also called horizontal partitioning, is a technique in which rows are distributed among the database servers to perform queries faster. In the case of sharding, a hash operation will be performed on the table rows (mostly on one of the columns) and, based on the hash operation output, the rows will be grouped and sent to the proper database server. Take a look at the following diagram:

As shown in the previous diagram, if all the table data (only four rows and one column are shown for illustration purpose) is stored in a single database server, the read and write operations will become slower and the server that has the frequently ...