A computer-implemented method that includes receiving an ingestion request to ingest data to a database comprising physical shards and detecting that the ingestion request is directed to a first hotspot shard. The first hotspot shard has a contention level over a threshold value. The method also detects context characteristics within the data and generates a first virtual shard based on a first virtual shard key selected from the detected context characteristics. The first virtual shard virtually duplicates at least a portion of the first hotspot shard. The method also includes ingesting the data to the first virtual shard.