Sharding, and all that

[Mark Fowler]

So,

It's nearly the new year and the time for new projects.  On my project  
radar for next year is "consider (better) sharding our MySQL database."

Now I understand the basic principles behind this and can, if needs  
be, implement my own wheel, but before I do I'd love to find out what  
everyone else is doing. Are there any good reference sites out there -  
MySQL sharding success stories if you will - and how did they do it?   
I'm pretty sure that everyone does it slightly differently but the  
more things I can look at before considering my own implementation,  
the better.

Hot technologies (by which I mean what blogs and google have been  
throwing at me recently) include:

- Spock Proxy
- MySQL Clustering
- Implementing it at the app level.

What's the collective group think on these?  Obviously (for this list,  
at least) the app that will be accessing the database is Perl based,  
so I'm only considering compatible technologies at the moment.

Mark.