An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard | High Scalability

An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard | High Scalability: "While working at Auction Watch, Dathan got the idea to solve their scaling problems by creating a database server for a group of users and running those servers on cheap Linux boxes. In this scheme the data for User A is stored on one server and the data for User B is stored on another server. It's a federated model. Groups of 500K users are stored together in what are called shards."