Oracle Sharding is a scalability, availability and geo-distribution feature for suitable OLTP applications that enables distribution and replication of data across a pool of Oracle databases that share no hardware or software. The pool of databases is presented to the application as a single logical database. Applications elastically scale (data, transactions and users) to any level, on any platform, simply by adding additional databases (shards) to the pool. Scaling up to 1000 shards is supported in the first release with Oracle Database 12.2.0.1.

Oracle Sharding provides superior run-time performance and simpler life-cycle management compared to home-grown deployments that use a similar approach to scalability. It also provides the advantages of an enterprise DBMS, including: relational schema, SQL, and other programmatic interfaces, support for complex data types, online schema changes, multi-core scalability, advanced security, compression, high-availability, ACID properties, consistent reads, developer agility with JSON, and much more.

For all the blog posts regarding Sharding in my blog site, please go to the Sharding category. For more info, do visit the Oracle Sharding portal on Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Follow me on Twitter @nageshbattula