Hello:

As almost all the people posted regarding Hibernate Shards, I also got very much excited to read about the Shards philosophy and technology.

How does Shards compares against (what advantage the developer will get) on using Shards against Horizontal partitioning feature in the DB itslef ?(since now MyQL 5.1 supports that). If I use horizontal partitioning on the DB, then my DB will take care of hiding the complexities about the partitioning and I can continue the same way I am using Hibernate now without anychange in the code but with added performance benefits from partitioning from DB side, right ? (I don't know much about DB level partitioning. Please correct me if i am wrong. I am looking into horizontal partitionong as a solution for degraded performance due to tables with large number of records).

thanks and regards,

--Kannan.

Hello:

I thought this is a basic question. Seeing zero reponses, i am confused now. Am i missing something obvious ? Any pointers will be helpful.

thanks and regards,

- Kannan.

Sorry for the delay Kannan, I was taking it easy this weekend. :-)

If all your data fits in a single database and it's acceptable to handle requests using a database that resides in a single location, you don't need Shards. MySql 5.1 supports horizontal partitioning within a single database server. I haven't tried it myself, but if it works as advertised it should allow a single database to continue to perform with larger datasets than before. However, there are limits to the amount of data that you can efficiently query in a relational database, and when you find yourself bumping up against that limit it may be a good time to look at Shards.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,
Max

Hello Max,

Thanks very much for the detailed reply. It has clarified my doubts.

thanks and regards,

-- Kannan.