Adrien Payong covers one technique to scale out databases:
Companies of all sizes and across industries are struggling to cope with an explosion of data never before seen in the short history of computing. As applications reach new levels of sophistication and become deeply interconnected, these companies find themselves increasingly overworked, overheated, and at their wits’ end, desperately trying to squeeze just a bit more performance and availability out of their aging database architectures.
Enter sharding, a powerful database architecture pattern that offers a solution to these challenges. Sharding scales out databases as data volume and user load grow, providing performance and high availability by spreading a database’s data across multiple servers.
Read on to learn more about it. Adrien mentions MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL, and Postgres, though the real trick of sharding is in the client, so it also works for other data platform technologies as well, including SQL Server.