Which sharding strategy assigns contiguous ranges of shard key values to specific shards, enabling efficient range scans but risking hot spots when traffic concentrates on a single range?

Which sharding strategy assigns contiguous ranges of shard key values to specific shards, enabling efficient range scans but risking hot spots when traffic concentrates on a single range?

• A. Range-Based Sharding assigns contiguous ranges of shard key values to specific shards.
• B. Directory-Based Sharding stores shard assignments in a lookup table for flexible movement.
• C. Consistent Hashing uses a virtual ring to minimize data movement.
• D. Hot Spot Problem describes unequal traffic across shards.

Answer: (A)

Range-based sharding partitions data by ranges of the shard key values, assigning each range to a specific shard. This layout makes range queries efficient because all data for adjacent keys sits on the same shard, reducing the need to touch many shards. But the flip side is a potential hot spot when traffic concentrates on a single range, causing that shard to become overloaded while others are underutilized. Flexible lookup-based approaches exist, but they don’t inherently optimize for range scans; consistent hashing distributes keys to balance load and minimize movement without preserving contiguous ranges; and “hot spot” describes the effect of uneven access patterns rather than a specific sharding method.

Range-based sharding partitions data by ranges of the shard key values, assigning each range to a specific shard. This layout makes range queries efficient because all data for adjacent keys sits on the same shard, reducing the need to touch many shards. But the flip side is a potential hot spot when traffic concentrates on a single range, causing that shard to become overloaded while others are underutilized. Flexible lookup-based approaches exist, but they don’t inherently optimize for range scans; consistent hashing distributes keys to balance load and minimize movement without preserving contiguous ranges; and “hot spot” describes the effect of uneven access patterns rather than a specific sharding method.