Partitioning is a general term used to describe the act of breaking up your logical data elements into multiple entities for the purpose of performance, availability, or maintainability.  

 

 

Sharding is the equivalent of "horizontal partitioning".  When you shard a database, you create replica‘s of the schema, and then divide what data is stored in each shard based on a shard key.  For example, I might shard my customer database using CustomerId as a shard key - I‘d store ranges 0-10000 in one shard and 10001-20000 in a different shard.  When choosing a shard key, the DBA will typically look at data-access patterns and space issues to ensure that they are distributing load and space across shards evenly.  

 

 

"Vertical partitioning" is the act of splitting up the data stored in one entity into multiple entities - again for space and performance reasons.  For example, a customer might only have one billing address, yet I might choose to put the billing address information into a separate table with a CustomerId reference so that I have the flexibility to move that information into a separate database, or different security context, etc.    

 

 

To summarize - partitioning is a generic term that just means dividing your logical entities into different physical entities for performance, availability, or some other purpose.  "Horizontal partitioning", or sharding, is replicating the schema, and then dividing the data based on a shard key.  "Vertical partitioning" involves dividing up the schema (and the data goes along for the ride).  

 

 

Final note:  you can combine both horizontal and vertical partitioning techniques - sometimes required in big data, high traffic environments.

 

 

I take sharding to mean the partitioning of a table over multiple machines (over multiple database instances in a distributed database system), whereas partitioning may just refer to the splitting up of a table on the same machine.

 

 

So a table that is sharded has been partitioned, but a table that has been partitioned has not necessarily been sharded. 

 

 

Zz from: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-sharding-DB-tables-and-partitioning-them