Oracle Sharding is now available in Oracle Cloud with Oracle Database Cloud Service as well as Kubernetes and Docker containers (OKE).

Oracle Sharding enables hyperscale, globally distributed, converged databases. It supports applications that require linear scalability, elasticity, fault isolation and geographic distribution of data for data sovereignty.

It does so by distributing chunks of a data set across independent Oracle databases (shards). Shards can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises and require no specialized hardware or software.

The following figure shows a table horizontally partitioned across three shards.

Figure 1-1 Horizontal Partitioning of a Table Across Shards

Benefits of Sharding

• Linear Scalability. Sharding eliminates performance bottlenecks and makes it possible to linearly scale performance and capacity by adding shards.
• Fault Containment. Sharding is a shared nothing hardware infrastructure that eliminates single points of failure, such as shared disk, SAN, and clusterware, and provides strong fault isolation—the failure or slow-down of one shard does not affect the performance or availability of other shards.
• Geographical Distribution of Data. Sharding makes it possible to store particular data close to its consumers and satisfy regulatory requirements when data must be located in a particular jurisdiction.
• Rolling Upgrades. Applying configuration changes on one shard at a time does not affect other shards, and allows administrators to first test the changes on a small subset of data.

Unlike NoSQL solutions, Oracle Sharding provides strong data consistency, the full power of SQL, support for structured and unstructured data, and the Oracle Database ecosystem.

Additional Information

Please review following links for additional information.

Sharding Oracle Database Cloud Service : This is the listing for sharding automation available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Marketplace. It automates provisioning and management of Oracle Sharded Database. Automation includes the following features

• Supports system-managed sharding on Oracle Enterprise Extreme performance database edition.
• Automatic and uniform distribution of Shards, Catalog and Shard Directors across ADs in a region and Fault Domains within each AD.
• Supports dataguard based data replication for shards and catalog and thus provides high availability within a region.
• Provides the ability to easily scale the number of Shards and provides horizontal scalability.
• Provides the ability to easily scale the number of Shard Directors for high availabillity and load balancing of requests.

Sharding with Kubernetes and Docker containers in Oracle Cloud (OKE) – This GitHub repository has deployment procedures for automating provisioning of Oracle Sharded Databases on Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ansible Modules and Helm/Chart.

Reference Architecture Patterns – These are customer inspired Oracle Cloud deployment architecture patterns with best practices for scalability, availability and security

Oracle Database Sharding – This is Oracle Sharding product page which has latest information, customer case studies and links to various resources.

Source: oracle