Database “sharding” came from UO?
L essons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term. What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?
So I started reading a bit about it. It basically means running a bunch of parallel databases and looking into the right one, rather than trying to cram everything into one.
Near as I can tell, a quick Google seems to say that the term came about because of a guy who worked at Friendster and Flickr, and seems to . Wikipedia has only had an article for a little while. In the comment thread at Lessons Learned, there’s mention of the term being used in 2006.
Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending. In fact, I was quoted in Ludicorp’s business plan, and Stewart Butterfield had asked if I could be an advisor, but I couldn’t do it at the time because of my contract with Sony. Sigh. Anyway, I would be shocked if the term “shard” hadn’t been thrown around those offices… because in MMOs, of course, “shards” has a very specific meaning and history.
It means database partitioning — of worlds. Parallel worlds each running the same static template database source, but evolving different runtime databases. But these were just called “servers” — like, Meridian 59 had bunches of them, and they had numbers instead of the common practice of names that is in use today.
