Another common reason is that on distributed databases you often don't want your data stored in the same chunk/shard as the last one. You want to spread out you

Another common reason is that on distributed databases you often don't want your data stored in the same chunk/shard as the last one. You want to spread out your writes. This of course is not good design if your access patterns involve a lot of sequential reads, so you have to be aware of what you are going to do.