NAÏVE, CLIENT-SIDE SHARDING WITH ONLINE ADDITION OF SHARDS

摘要

Multiple clients can be enabled to perform operations relative to data items in a shard system asynchronously to each other without the use by those clients of exclusive locks. A rebalancing event, in which data items are redistributed automatically among a set of shards due to a modification of the quantity of shards in the system, can be performed without the use of exclusive locks by clients. Clients can continue to perform operations relative to at least some of the data items in the shard system even while rebalancing processes are redistributing at least some of the data items asynchronously during a system-wide rebalancing event. All of these benefits can be obtained without sacrificing data consistency within the shard system.