Scenario: In a scalability test for a social media platform, you notice that the database becomes a bottleneck as user data grows. What technique can be used to address this scalability challenge?

Sharding is a technique used to horizontally partition a database into smaller, more manageable parts called shards. Each shard contains a subset of the data, allowing for distributed storage and improved scalability. By spreading the data across multiple shards, the workload on any single database server is reduced, mitigating the risk of the database becoming a bottleneck as user data grows. Additionally, sharding enhances fault tolerance and facilitates parallel processing, contributing to better overall performance and scalability of the system.