MySQL can't scale horizontally if you're using it like it's a relational database. No joins between shards means Sarah Mei could throw away her data model if s

MySQL can't scale horizontally if you're using it like it's a relational database. No joins between shards means Sarah Mei could throw away her data model if she needs sharding. She would then need to denormalize her data to avoid joins, which is the main argument in the article. The project they were working on was a social network, a free alternative to Facebook. So I guess it's safe to say a single box, even the biggest you can imagine, could not ensure scalability. Beyond certain limits, sharding is the only option. Facebook has implemented exactly the denormalization despised in the article, and they're using MySQL, albeit just as a dumb key/value store ;-)