Use Case: Online Shopping Website

Imagine you are running a popular online shopping website that sells various products. Your website has a vast amount of data, including product details, customer information, and order history.

1. Partitioning:

Scenario: Your website has millions of products, and searching through all of them at once is becoming slow and inefficient.

Solution (Partitioning): You decide to partition your product data based on categories. For example, all electronics products (like smartphones, laptops) go into one partition, clothing products (shirts, dresses) go into another, and so on. Each partition becomes a smaller, manageable subset of the entire product database. Now, when customers search for electronics, the system only needs to look through the electronics partition, making searches faster and more efficient.

2. Sharding:

Scenario: Your online shopping website has expanded globally, and you have customers from different regions. However, your database server in one location is struggling to handle the increasing number of users worldwide.

Solution (Sharding): You decide to shard your customer data based on geographic regions. For example, all customers from North America go to one shard, customers from Europe to another, and so on. Each shard is a separate database located in different regions. Now, customers' data is distributed across multiple servers, reducing the load on any single server and improving response times for users in different parts of the world.

3. Replication:

Scenario: Your website experiences high traffic, and you can't afford any downtime. If your database server fails, your website would be inaccessible, causing a loss in sales.

Solution (Replication): You set up database replication. You have a primary database server that handles all the transactions and customer interactions. Additionally, you create replica servers that are exact copies of the primary server. These replicas stay in sync with the primary server in real-time. If the primary server fails, one of the replicas can take over, ensuring that your website remains operational without any interruption. Replication provides redundancy and high availability for your database, reducing the risk of downtime due to server failures.

In this use case:

• Partitioning helps in organizing product data for efficient searches.

• Sharding helps in distributing customer data across different geographic regions for better performance.

• Replication ensures high availability and fault tolerance, keeping the website operational even if one server fails.