The concept of partitioning and sharding in YugabyteDB is often misunderstood as two separate concepts, but they can actually be used together to create unique configurations such as row-level geo-partitioning. In YugabyteDB, every table and index is automatically sharded across the cluster, regardless of whether it's partitioned or not. This means that partitioning is treated at the query level, while sharding is at the storage level. Users can verify this by checking the tablets created in their cluster or using a specific `yb-admin` command to list all the tablets associated with a particular table.