I have heard the 'shard' technique mentioned several times with regard to solving scaling problems for large websites. What is this 'shard' technique and why is it so good?
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A:
In brief, imagine seperating your users_tbl across several servers. So Users 1-5000 and on Server 1, Users 5000-10000 on Server 2; etc. If your data model is sufficiently abstract in code, it's often not a huge change in code.
Of course this approach becomes difficult if all your queries are similar to "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users_tbl GROUP BY userType" but when your where is "WHERE userid = 5" then it makes more sense.
Tom Ritter
2008-09-18 11:28:35