About Sharding: In database architecture, sharding is a pattern that relates to horizontal partitioning, which is the practice of separating one table’s rows into multiple different tables, known as partitions. Sharding involves breaking up one’s data into two or more smaller chunks, called logical shards. The logical shards are then distributed across separate database nodes, referred to as physical shards, which can hold multiple logical shards. Despite this, the data held within all the shards collectively represent an entire logical dataset. Many blockchain protocols are looking at sharding as a potential solution to increase scalability
About Near: NEAR is a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of the Open Web in their hands. Although sharding is a difficult engineering problem that has rarely been successfully implemented, the NEAR team has previously built one of the only sharded databases in production at scale today (which is used by Uber, Goldman Sachs, and Comcast).
