Sharding is a technique applied to certain block chains or blockchain. It consists of dividing a network into smaller parts called shardyes This facilitates scalability and the highest speed of processing operations.
In other words, sharding is a system implemented from blockchain technology by which the network is separated into different compartments. This, instead of everything being part of the same network.
Sharding has, as we mentioned, the purpose of promoting business scalability. This concept refers to the ability of a company, project or computer system to achieve exponential growth.
Likewise, sharding seeks to improve the speed of the system. In other words, more operations or transactions will be able to be carried out per second.
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To understand why sharding improves scalability and speed, we need to remember how the blockchain works.
The blockchain problem and the sharding solution
Blockchain is a digital database where all transactions made on something specific are shared. Information is grouped into blocks.
The operations are recorded in the computers of all those who are part of the chain, including data such as quantity, date, operation and participants.
If a part of the chain suffers, for example, a hacker or malware attack, the network participants can identify which data has been modified. This, since everyone keeps a copy of the information.
This blockchain system, which creates a network of public witnesses, reduces the risk of fraud. However, as the number of operations to process increases, the system can slow down. This represents an important challenge, since the conventional systems by which, for example, online banking operations are carried out, are faster.
To prevent these speed issues from occurring, sharding was designed.
In blockchain, each node or connection point must process all the operations that are carried out in the network. Sharding proposes to solve this by distributing the workload in such a way that each node does not have to process all the information of the network, but only that of a portion of that network.
Types
There are two types of sharding. To explain it, let’s imagine that we have a pivot table like the following:
| Name | loan principal | Annual interest rate | principal amortized | Term (years) | |
| Alvaro Gutierrez | 200,000 | 5% | 40,000 | 5 | |
| Anne War | 250,000 | 4.5% | 100,000 | 4 | |
| Stephanie Alcantara | 230,000 | 6% | 50,0000 | 6 | |
| Ernest Huertas | 321,000 | 7.1% | 60,000 | 4 | |
| Salvador Rosales | 380,000 | 6.5% | 80,000 | 6 | |
| Augusto Ramos | 290,000 | 6.2% | 70,000 | 5 | |
| uriel smith | 310,000 | 5.5% | 75,000 | 6 | |
| Olga Casas | 270,000 | 4.7% | 30,000 | 5 | |
| Patricia Husillos | 210,000 | 5.3% | 110,000 | 4 | |
| Ignatius Mustios | 390,000 | 7.5% | 120,000 | 6 |
- Horizontal: Each new shard has information about the same variables, but the data is different. In other words, in the case of loans, each shard contains information about different loans, as we can see below. Loans from more than two debtors could also be grouped in the shard. For example, from the first five in the table above.
| Name | loan principal | Annual interest rate | principal amortized | Term (years) | |
| Alvaro Gutierrez | 200,000 | 5% | 40,000 | 5 | |
| Anne War | 250,000 | 4.5% | 100,000 | 4 |
| Name | loan principal | Annual interest rate | principal amortized | Term (years) | |
| Stephanie Alcantara | 230,000 | 6% | 50,0000 | 6 | |
| Ernest Huertas | 321,000 | 7.1% | 60,000 | 4 |
- Vertical: Continuing with the previous example, in this case, a shard would have the data of the names of the debtors and the principal of the loan. Another shard could contain the annual interest rate and the amortized principal.
| Name | loan principal | |
| Alvaro Gutierrez | 200,000 | |
| Anne War | 250,000 | |
| Stephanie Alcantara | 230,000 | |
| Ernest Huertas | 321,000 | |
| Salvador Rosales | 380,000 | |
| Augusto Ramos | 290,000 | |
| uriel smith | 310,000 | |
| Olga Casas | 270,000 | |
| Patricia Husillos | 210,000 | |
| Ignatius Mustios | 390,000 |
*As a curiosity, sharding is used by the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
