shardspecific

Shardspecific is an adjective used in computing to describe data, configurations, or behavior that pertain to a single shard in a sharded system. A shard is a partition of a dataset or service instance that distributes workload across multiple nodes to improve scalability. Shardspecific items are those that are stored, processed, or enforced within the bounds of a particular shard and are not globally visible without cross-shard coordination.

In database sharding, shard-specific data resides on the shard determined by the shard key. Queries and transactions can be shard-specific when they target data using the shard key, while cross-shard operations require routing and coordination to ensure consistency.

In distributed services, a shard-specific instance handles only requests for its shard, enabling parallelism but necessitating cross-shard transactions for composite operations or global policies. This design supports scalability and isolation but adds complexity for operations that span multiple shards.

Examples include user data partitioned by user_id, where user records are shard-specific, and regionally partitioned product catalogs that keep items in shard-specific caches. The term is informal and descriptive, used in technical writing and vendor documentation to distinguish shard-local behavior from global behavior.