Horizontal Scaling with HiveDB

Massively scalable systems used to be the sole province of large corporations with acronyms for names and budgets the size of a small country’s GDP, but with the explosion of user-created content sites scaling is now everybody’s problem.

One of the main strategies for scaling databases is to partition the data across many servers. This is a simple enough idea but requires a good deal of expertise in systems design, programming, and MySQL administration to execute successfully. Many horizontal partitioning systems have been built and put into production in corporate environments, but so far none of them have:

• Built an easily extensible platform
• Released their system under an open source license

This session introduces HiveDB, an open source framework for partitioning MySQL that implements the core ideas behind horizontal partitioning in as clear and concise a way as possible.

While HiveDB is written in JAVA, this session is useful for those interested in scaling MySQL in any environment. HiveDB provides a web service making it language agnostic.