Sharding and data availability sampling
As we explained earlier, sharding is the major focus in the Ethereum community post-merge. It is considered the final piece of the puzzle in overall Ethereum scaling solutions. With the rollup-centric roadmap, Ethereum has scaled back from full execution and data sharding to a much-simplified data sharding solution. In this section, we will dive deep into Ethereum’s approach to data sharding.
Sharding is not a new concept – it is a common scaling technique in distributed systems. It has been implemented in a variety of distributed database systems, from RDBMSs to many modern big data NoSQL databases. Essentially, sharding is a particular method for horizontally partitioning large datasets within a database. More specifically, the database is broken into little pieces called shards that, when aggregated, form the original database. In the following screenshot, we can see that one large dataset can be sliced horizontally into two...
