I enjoyed this article and also found a link to this one which I found equally interesting: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sharding-i

I enjoyed this article and also found a link to this one which I found equally interesting: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sharding-ids-at-instagram http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sha... I worked with the Flickr-style ticket DB id setup at Etsy, and while it was lovely once it was all set up, it's way more complicated (requiring two dedicated servers and a lot of software and operations stuff.) The solution outlined by instagram of just having a clever schema layout and stored procedure that safely allocates IDs locally on each logical shard is elegant and I'm having a hard time blowing holes in it.