Searching across shards?
Short version If I split my users into shards, how do I offer a "user search"? Obviously, I don't want every search to hit every shard. Long version By shard, I mean have multiple databases where each contains a fraction of the total data. For (a naive) example, the databases UserA, UserB, etc. might contain users whose names begin with "A", "B", etc. When a new user signs up, I simple examine his name and put him into the correct database. When a returning user signs in, I again look at his name to determine the correct database to pull his information from. The advantage of sharding vs read