a minor con of this approach is that you have to add an extra layer to your application to do these operations, i.e. to abstract them. But probably the speed &

a minor con of this approach is that you have to add an extra layer to your application to do these operations, i.e. to abstract them. But probably the speed & other gains surpass the cons, and in such a big team, i'm sure they will easily handle such an abstraction layer. One good idea is to open source it, so if other people can take advantage of it, they will also help you maintain it and find bugs for it. A question: If you started this now, would you consider using Postgres-XL AFAIK it supports similar shardings, in a more transparent manner for the developers. Any thoughts on this?