SQL databases are often a bottleneck with cloud applications, and yet they’re so powerful that we use them all the time. The problem is that while they’re great for reporting they can really struggle under heavy transaction loads. Other cloud resources like websites and background processing apps easily handle heavy loads because you can scale them both horizontally and vertically. But most cloud developers only scale SQL databases vertically, and that gets expensive quickly. Fortunately the Elastic Database Tools save the day! With the Elastic Database Tools you can segregate your data across multiple SQL Database shards in whatever way makes sense for your data. It handles single-tenant and multi-tenant scenarios, and even provides a facility for splitting and merging shards as needed. We’ll walk through the process of setting up SQL Database sharding. Then we’ll see how you change your application code to use the Elastic Database Client Library to execute shard-specific queries, and even query across many shards. We’ll also have some fun with the split-merge tool. Finally we’ll do some load testing to see how we’ve spread the load across databases.