StackScholar

Databases

Sharding

Splitting data horizontally across databases by a shard key.

Why interviewers ask about it

Shard-key choice is the whole game. A key with skewed access creates a hot shard, and cross-shard joins and transactions become application problems.

Related terms

Read-write splitting

Sending writes to a primary and reads to replicas.

Normalisation

Organising tables to remove redundancy: 1NF removes repeating groups, 2NF partial dependencies, 3NF transitive ones.

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