US Patent 9411862 Systems and methods for dynamic sharding of hierarchical data

A method for serving a request for hierarchical data includes receiving, at a processing circuit, a request for hierarchical data stored in one or more databases. The request includes an indication of a particular data hierarchy. The method further includes identifying, by the processing circuit, one or more entity count records corresponding to the particular data hierarchy. The entity count records indicate a distribution of the hierarchical data within the data hierarchy. The method further includes splitting the request for hierarchical data into a plurality of sharded requests based on the distribution of the hierarchical data indicated by the one or more entity count records, assigning the plurality of sharded requests to one or more processing sites for processing at least a subset of the sharded requests in parallel, and reporting a combined result of processing the plurality of sharded requests.