Being an owner of a restaurant, what would you do if you were hosting too many customers but with only a few waiters to attend to them? The simple answer is that you would get more waiters for catering your services. Whenever there is congestion in services through one portal, there is a requirement for some service expansion.
A similar approach applies to data management. In terms of database management, the expansion is done with the help of sharding. The term sharding means creating smaller parts of a whole. Whenever a database gets too crowded with more and more additions coming in, the developers shard the database to small ones for the audience to get to other databases that have properties just like the original one. This principle can be applied to blockchain technology as well.
In this post, we find out ‘what is sharding?’ in detail.
What is Sharding?
Sharding, as mentioned before, is the process of partitioning a database into smaller units to divert the audience and reduce congestion on one main network. Let us take blockchain sharding for example. Blockchain sharding is a technique used by developers to scale and process more transactions per minute. Sharding is required for tackling the complexities faced by the developers in serving a large number of audiences at a time. So, sharding is a simple technique used for scaling up a network and reducing congestion.
You might have heard of the Ethereum Merge that took place in the latter half of 2022. Now that Ethereum has switched to a proof of stake mechanism, Ethereum 2.0 will have 64 new chains through sharding, all of which will run parallel to the main chain of the network, also called the Beacon Chain.
How Does Sharding Work?
Since we have already established that sharding is the partitioning of a database, the function of sharding is simply to break down a database into small pieces. But it is not as simple as it sounds. Usually, sharding is done to provide a special character to each shard of the database. This means that a shard would store a specific kind of data and therefore reduce the overall network congestion on the main database.
Sharding works in a way that it divides the main storage system into horizontal partitions of the database through division amongst the rows. These rows are conceptualized and given a specific kind of characteristic data to be stored. For example, in the case of sharding the database related to real estate deals, one shard can be conceptualized to store the data related to financial transactions. Other shards can be responsible for storing the state and transaction history.
Blockchain sharding is another example of the process of horizontal sharding. Here, a specific kind of digital asset might be stored in each shard to make the native blockchain less congested.
Shards of a primary database can be made so they can easily share data with one another. The shards can work together whenever a user tries to access a specific kind of data. This makes the whole process of sharing information easier and decentralized.
Why is Sharding Needed?
Now that blockchain is being adopted across a range of industries, blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin are being used by multiple projects from various sectors, and network congestion has become quite common. This is why, now more than ever, blockchain sharding has become a necessity.
With higher volumes of transactions and all operations limited to just one blockchain, the whole network becomes slow. Sharding can be a good solution to provide scalability and ease of adding information to a database, and sorting out the data stored within a database. While sharding does add a certain extent of complexity to the management of the database, the benefits are certainly worth it.
Advantages of Sharding
- Sharding helps in scaling the database and therefore helps it handle more data.
- With shards, the whole process of adding and generating input and output becomes faster. The read and write operations are divided between separate shards.
- The overall data storage capacity of a network becomes much higher with several shards in place.
- Each shard is a replica of the original database, so even if one shard temporarily stops, the whole database keeps functioning partially.
Disadvantages of Sharding
- Sharding requires additional query machines which will instruct the algorithm to add specific data to different shards. This increases the cost of maintenance and operations for the whole database.
- The infrastructure cost related to all the additional machinery and the computing power makes administration costlier.
Conclusion
We do hope this article gives you a good idea of what sharding is, and how blockchain sharding is important! As network scalability grows to become a more prominent issue the older the blockchain technology gets, sharding is a much sought-out solution to manage these growing databases.
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