Bitcoin Forum

Sharding : Horizontal partitioning is a design principle whereby rows of a database table are held separately, rather than splitting by columns (as for normalization). Each partition forms part of a shard, which may in turn be located on a separate database server or physical location. The advantage is the number of rows in each table is reduced (this reduces index size, thus improves search performance). If the sharding is based on some real-world aspect of the data (e.g. European customers vs. American customers) then it may be possible to infer the appropriate shard membership easily and automatically, and query only the relevant shard.

How it will use in Eth Blockchain:

We split the state and history up into K = O(n / c) partitions that we call “shards”. For example, a sharding scheme on Ethereum might put all addresses starting with 0x00 into one shard, all addresses starting with 0x01 into another shard, etc. In the simplest form of sharding, each shard also has its own transaction history, and the effect of transactions in some shard k are limited to the state of shard k. One simple example would be a multi-asset blockchain, where there are K shards and each shard stores the balances and processes the transactions associated with one particular asset. In more advanced forms of sharding, some form of cross-shard communication capability, where transactions on one shard can trigger events on other shards, is also included