Patent attributes
Methods and systems for shard splitting are provided. Exemplary methods include: marking a source index as read only, the source index comprising a source shard, the source shard comprising a source reference; creating a target index, the target index comprising target shards, each target shard of the target shards comprising a target reference of target references; copying the source reference, the copying producing the target references; hashing identifiers in the source reference, each identifier being associated with a document of a plurality of documents of the source shard, the hashing assigning each document of the plurality of documents to a target shard of the target shards, the plurality of documents being stored in a file associated with the source reference; hard linking the file into the target references; marking the target index as read-write; and deleting the source index.