What are replication, sharding, and partitioning?

These are three different approaches to organizing and scaling databases:

• Replication — the process of copying and synchronizing data between multiple servers or databases. It helps increase availability and fault tolerance, as well as distribute read load.

• Sharding — horizontal partitioning of data into parts (shards), each stored on a separate server. This helps scale the database by volume and load, distributing queries across different nodes.

• Partitioning — logical division of a table into parts (partitions) within a single database, usually based on a specific criterion (e.g., by date). This improves query performance and data management.

Example: in an online store, replication ensures data availability, sharding allows storing orders by regions on different servers, and partitioning divides the orders table by months for quick search.