Viktar Patotski ·
· Databases
· 13 min read The Database Scaling Ladder: Every Cheaper Fix Before You Shard
Most teams reach for sharding years before they need it. There is a ladder of cheaper, lower-risk fixes that comes first, and the right rung depends on which bottleneck you actually have: read load, write load, or data size. Here is the ladder, from cheapest to last resort.