US Patent 12105692 Shard management for scaling database tables

Shard management may be implemented for scalable database tables. A table may be identified as aligned with another table of the database according to a common shard key across multiple shards that are mapped to respective storage volumes of a data store of the database according to a placement hierarchy. Different portions of the table may be stored across the shards as respective table slices with corresponding portions of the other table as respective other table slices with same values of the shard key. Metadata for performing access requests to the database may be updated to identify individual ones of the table slices stored with individual ones of the other table slices as respective table slice groups that are mapped to respective ones of the shards in the placement hierarchy.