Obviously it depends on what you are doing. However, if you are trying to keep everything in one consistent environment it does win out. Also I expect that wi

Obviously it depends on what you are doing. However, if you are trying to keep everything in one consistent environment it does win out. Also I expect that with 9.2 we will probably see a release of Postgres-XC which will kick the pants off any MySQL sharding solution out there. Postgres-XC is a way to abstract database shards such that referential integrity etc. is enforced between shards. The best comparison to date would be to Teradata's clustering system. Better yet, Postgres-XC is just a set of patches on PostgreSQL, and is on-the-wire compatible, so you can swap it out when your database gets too big. This will also bring an ability to concurrently query different shards and aggregate the results without the application having to know anything about the sharding....