MySQL sharding approaches?

Question

What is the best approach for Sharding MySQL tables. The approaches I can think of are :

1. Application Level sharding?
2. Sharding at MySQL proxy layer?

Answer 1

Shard-Query is an OLAP based sharding solution for MySQL. It allows you to define a combination of sharded tables and unsharded tables. The unsharded tables (like lookup tables) are freely joinable to sharded tables, and sharded tables may be joined to each other as long as the tables are joined by the shard key (no cross shard or self joins that cross shard boundaries). Being an OLAP solution, Shard-Query usually has minimum response times of 100ms or less, even for simple queries so it will not work for OLTP. Shard-Query is designed for analyzing big data sets in parallel.

OLTP sharding solutions exist for MySQL as well. Closed source solutions include ScaleDB, DBShards. Open source OLTP solution include JetPants, Cubrid or Flock/Gizzard (Twitter infrastructure).