AdvancedTechnical
5 min
Designing a Database Sharding Strategy
DatabasesShardingScalability
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Interview Question
Explain how you would design and implement database sharding for a large-scale application.
Key Points to Cover
- Identify sharding keys and partitioning strategies (range, hash, geo)
- Plan rebalancing and resharding mechanisms
- Ensure cross-shard query strategies
- Handle consistency and transactional guarantees
- Monitor shard health and capacity
Evaluation Rubric
Defines sharding keys and patterns30% weight
Handles resharding and rebalancing30% weight
Considers cross-shard queries20% weight
Addresses consistency and failure modes20% weight
Hints
- 💡Consider CAP theorem and shard mapping.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Choosing a sharding key that leads to uneven data distribution and hot spots.
- ⚠️Underestimating the complexity and downtime associated with rebalancing and resharding.
- ⚠️Ignoring the performance impact of cross-shard queries and joins.
- ⚠️Failing to adequately address distributed transaction consistency and potential deadlocks.
- ⚠️Lack of comprehensive monitoring and an insufficient rollback plan, leading to unrecoverable issues.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How would you migrate to sharded architecture?
- ❓What’s the impact on joins?
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