Before diving into setting up database sharding, make sure you've got these things covered:

• Your Supabase project is up and running.
• You know your way around database sharding concepts.
• You're comfortable with database operations.

Supabase is packed with features, but it doesn't support database sharding out of the box. However, you can still get it done by tweaking some settings and deploying multiple Supabase instances.

Database sharding is all about breaking your database into smaller pieces called "shards". Supabase doesn't offer automatic sharding, but you can set it up by deploying multiple instances and handling the database operations yourself.

Here's how to set up multiple Supabase instances:

Step 1: Create a new project on Supabase for each shard you need. For example, if you need 3 shards, create three separate projects: shard1, shard2, and shard3.

Step 2: Set up your database schema for each of these instances.

To shard your data, you'll need to manually distribute it across the different Supabase instances. Choose the method that works best for your app:

• Range sharding: Split data based on a range, like entries A-M on shard1, N-Z on shard2.
• Hash-based sharding: Use a hash function to evenly distribute data across all shards.
• List sharding: Distribute data based on a list of values.

After distributing the data, double-check everything to keep data consistency.

To access data from these shards, use the individual API endpoint and secret key for each Supabase instance. You'll need to manage which instance you're accessing based on how the data is sharded. This requires solid application logic.

Keep in mind that while you can manually implement sharding with Supabase, there are some challenges:

• Managing data consistency.
• Higher costs due to multiple Supabase instances.
• Manually handling sharding logic and operations.

This guide shows a workaround for manual sharding since Supabase doesn't support built-in database sharding.