English

Verb

sharding

1. present participle of shard

Noun

sharding ‎(countable and uncountable, plural shardings)

1. (databases) A decomposition of a database into multiple smaller units that can handle requests individually.
   • 2006, A Merchant, M Kallahalla, R Swaminathan, Sharding method and apparatus using directed graphs, US Patent 7,043,621

     A storage volume with many different potential shardings is analyzed more rapidly by the reuse of calculations made on neighboring vertices in the directed graph.

   • 2007, T Brants, AC Popat, P Xu, FJ Och, J Dean, "Large Language Models in Machine Translation", in Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Empirical Methods in

     A sharding function determines which shard (chunk of data in the MapReduce framework) the pair is sent to.

2. A breaking into shards.
   • 1991, Lorraine Anderson, Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature, page 196

     A universe always shedding, a rain of sheddings and shardings.