You are designing a system with heavy Read and Update operations on the database. Which database design strategy would you adopt to balance the load and ensure data consistency?

In a scenario with heavy Read and Update operations, sharding is a database design strategy where you distribute the data across multiple servers or nodes. This helps balance the load and improve Read performance. Sharding ensures data consistency by managing data distribution and replication across shards. Replication (Option 2) can improve Read performance but doesn't address balancing the load directly. Denormalization (Option 3) can help with Reads but may complicate data consistency. Indexing (Option 4) helps with Read performance but doesn't balance the load.