Oracle Sharding is a response to customer demand for a relational database architecture that can deliver the combination of linear scalability and complete fault isolation without requiring shared storage or compromising on the enterprise qualities of the Oracle Database: strict consistency, the full power of SQL, developer agility with JSON, security, high availability, backup and recovery, life-cycle management, etc.

OLTP applications designed for Oracle sharding can elastically scale (data, transactions and users) to any level, on any platform, simply by deploying new shards on additional stand-alone servers. The unavailability or slowdown of a shard due to either an unplanned outage or planned maintenance affects only the users of that shard, it does not affect the availability or performance of the application for users of other shards. Each shard may run a different release of the Oracle Database as long as the application is backward compatible with the oldest running version – making it simple to maintain availability of an application while performing database maintenance.

Oracle Sharding also does more than just extend the enterprise qualities of Oracle to a sharded database architecture. Oracle Sharding uses automation to simplify life- cycle management, advanced partitioning methods to address a wide array of use-cases, and data-dependent routing for superior runtime performance. Collectively these capabilities provide customers substantial advantages compared to competitive sharding solutions or custom deployments.