Method and system for parallelizing database requests

Methods and systems are described for applying the use of shards within a single memory address space. A database request is processed by providing the request from a client to a processor, the processor then distributing the request to multiple threads within a single process but executing in a shared memory address environment, wherein each thread performs the request on a distinct shard, and aggregating the results of the multiple threads being aggregated and returning a final result to the client. By parallelizing operations in this way, the request response time can be reduced and the total amount of communication overhead can be reduced.