| Looking at a single academic paper's citation count won't reveal much about a term's historical currency. For example, there are also papers in Google Scholar (findable via query [database shard], through 1987) mentioning this same SHARD system in 1986 and 1987, with 33 and 97 citations respectively. And further, there's a 1986 MIT technical note that mentions a commercially-in-development version of this SHARD system, but refers back to a 1985 paper, "System architecture for partition-tolerant distributed databases", as an authoritative source about SHARD – though that 1985 paper doesn't declare the name SHARD. That's suggestive that SHARD was adopted as a catchy name for that particular work around 1985-1986, then becoming more widespread in the 1986-1988 timeframe. But perhaps more interesting: that original 1985 paper mentions in its acknowledgements Hector Garcia-Molina – a definite 'hub' person in databases/indexing/networked-information for decades, among many other things Google cofounder Sergey Brin's advisor at Stanford from 1993-1997. (See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Garc%C3%ADa-Molina...) So it's likely safe to assume that from the late 80s into the 90s, top CS students/researchers around the world discussing partitioned distributed databases would often have this particular sense of SHARD mentioned to them, or appear in their readings. Notably, that 1985 SHARD involved a system where each replica contained the entire database – so did not capture the modern connotations of 'shard', as horizontal partitions. But that vivid & apropos analogy was "in the air" around partitioned/distributed databases. Thus I'd strongly suspect uses in the modern, non-overlapping sense in that same era, likely predating Ultima Online's 1996ish use. (I'd especially look around precursor work to the 1997 'Consistent Hashing' paper, & other caching-centric work – because there the idea of partition-by-key was central.) So UO might have devised, but I'd guess more likely popularized, our modern sense of 'sharding'. |