The technical difference between sharding and partitioning is at which level the split lies. If you're splitting the data storage within a single database, it's

The technical difference between sharding and partitioning is at which level the split lies. If you're splitting the data storage within a single database, it's called partitioning. If you're splitting the data across multiple databases instead, it's sharding. But you can't implement either if you haven't logically partitioned your data first.