A piece of broken ceramic, metal, glass, or rock, typically having sharp edges. She carefully picked up the shard of glass from the floor to avoid injury.
A small part or portion of something, often used metaphorically. He only had a shard of hope left after hearing the disappointing news.
Computing: a horizontal partition of a dataset or database that is stored separately from others to improve scalability and performance. Each shard contains data for a specific geographic region.
Computing: a horizontally partitioned segment of a database or data set, stored separately to improve performance or scalability. The user table is divided into several shards to distribute the workload.