Sharding, and all that

[Nigel Hamilton]

HI Mark,

So,
>
> It's nearly the new year and the time for new projects.  On my project
> radar for next year is "consider (better) sharding our MySQL database."
>
>
I think it depends on your write/read ratio. If it is read heavy then
replication and/or memcache will probably do the trick - on the other hand
if you expect more writes than reads then I saw an interesting technique for
handling excess DB writes by using thousands of temporary MySQL MyISAM
tables[1].

Writing to MyISAM files is quick - but the downside is locking - by using
_lots_ of temporary MyISAM tables you can improve overall write capacity.

NIge

[1] These guys used 20,000+ MyISAM tables to scale writes
http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/detail/592