I'm new on the Hibernate forums but am a long-time user and guru on Hibernate. I currently work at Fitbit where we use Hibernate a good deal, and use Hibernate Shards to shard our databases such that we can separate out our data as we want. We have several other projects that have updated to Hibernate 4, since migrating to Hibernate 4 is relatively simple without any use of Shards. However, our larger projects all leverage Shards, and we have been blocked from updating to Hibernate 4 and the additional features that come along with it.

Our App Platform team is planning to pick up the torch on the Shards project and update it such that it works with Hibernate 4. Since this will all be an open source project, I'm posting here to get a sense for whether other developers would be interested in either using and/or contributing to the development of Hibernate 4 Shards.

I was also hoping someone could point me to the people that might be interested in Hibernate 4 Shards that are mentioned on http://hibernate.org/others/

Thanks,
David

Hi David,
that sounds great!
We normally point beginners to the forums to help each other out (too high volume), but who's interested in helping out and contributing in any form is very welcome on the developer's mailing list:
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev

Please introduce yourself there, we can then point you to the various guidelines to get started if you haven't found them already.
This is a good starting point; it focuses on Hibernate ORM but you can expect similar for Shards:
http://hibernate.org/orm/contribute/

I'd suggest you start by forking the repository and send some pull requests; we'll try to review them although we might not remember all details of Shards :)
As soon as we see you're versed with the process it won't take long to give you commit rights.

AFAIK someone had started the process to update Shards to Hibernate ORM 4 but I haven't been involved with that, hopefully others will be able to tell you more on the mailing list, or you might see some progress within the github repository.

Thanks,
Sanne

David, welcome! Sanne's right that there was a contributor last year that had been interested in working with Shards (I had been helping guide him), but his interested fizzled for whatever reason. I'm still *very* interested to work with contributors to get that updated for both ORM 4.x and the new 5.0. If you and Fitbit would like to step up to the plate, I'd be more than happy to be a resource as needed, as well as help contribute. Sanne's point about the hibernate-dev ML is a good one -- the wider the conversation's reach, the better.