Sharding: Different from Partitioning and Federation ?
Ive been hearing this word "sharding" more and more often, and its spreading like fire. Theo Schlossnagle, the author of " Scalable internet architecutres " argues that federation is form of partitioning, and that sharding is nothing but a form of partitioning and federation. Infact, according to him, Sharding has already been in use use for a long time . I'm not a dba, and I don't pretend to be one in my free time either, so to understand the differences I did some research and found some interesting posts. The first time I heard about "Sharding" was on Been Admininig's blog about Unorthodox approach to database design ( Part I and Part II ). Here is the exact reference... Splitting up the user data so that User A exists on one serverwhile User B exists on another server, each server now holds a s hard ofthe data in this federated model . A couple of months ago Highscalability.com picked it up and made it sound (probably unintentionally)