Sharding solutions

Once in a year or so we get a request of a customer about MariaDB/MySQL sharding solutions. So here we have a list of sharding solutions we are currently aware of:

• MySQL Fabric: A Brief Introduction to MySQL Fabric This product is discontinued by MySQL in the meanwhile!
• Spider Storage Engine for MariaDB: Spider Storage Engine Overview
• MariaDB MaxScale: Simple Sharding with Two Servers and Schema Router
• ProxySQL: Sharding in ProxySQL
• PingCap TiDB (Titan DB): Release Candidate der verteilten Datenbank TiDB veröffentlicht and PingCap
• Vitess: What is Vitess

What does it need for Schema sharding

• Metadata database: Where you record which customer schema is located in which shard (with a locking mechanism).
• Your application connector or a "sharding facility" must do the (re-)direction.
• A re-sharding mechanism for "load balancing".
• A good Monitoring per schema and per shard so you know which schema causes more load and which shard is soon overloaded.

See also our blog post: Sharding do-it-yourself.

Other articles:

• How does database sharding work?
• Using MariaDB MaxScale for Schema Sharding With Galera