Vitess is by far the biggest I've seen in practice. Sharding is at the root of storage management, which let's users design a strategy that fits their storage

Vitess is by far the biggest I've seen in practice. Sharding is at the root of storage management, which let's users design a strategy that fits their storage and request benchmarks. The biggest difference that I've seen is that you no longer get to use many of the MySQL operations and functions that you may be used to like relationships. It's analogous to the best and slightly painful parts of MySQL and NoSQL. Things like relationships get relegated to the application.