Dealing with large tables

Large databases often contain very large tables that make scaling difficult. This article covers three techniques to handle such tables while keeping the database performant: vertical scaling, vertical sharding, and horizontal sharding. Vertical scaling involves increasing the capacity of the server running the keyspace by adding more compute resources or growing the underlying storage capacity. Vertical sharding moves large tables onto separate servers, allowing for separate scaling of storage and compute for different parts of the database. Horizontal sharding takes a single table and spreads its rows out across many separate servers based on a sharding strategy, providing increased write throughput, backup speed, failure isolation, and cost savings.