CodeFutures Corporation has introduced the latest version of its dbShards, which provides cost-effective database scalability and performance using database sharding. The company also announced that Familybuilder, a fast-growing family application on the internet is using dbShards to keep up with the demands placed on its high-volume MySQL database, while simultaneously scaling to meet anticipated future growth. 

CodeFutures' database sharding tool uses a "shared-nothing" partitioning scheme that breaks down high-volume databases into individual "shards," in turn distributing these shards across a number of commodity or cloud-based servers. "dbShards is really the only product of its kind that actually provides database sharding capabilities in a packaged form," Cory Isaacson, CEO of CodeFutures, tells 5 Minute Briefing, explaining that database sharding is generally used by large companies that have the necessary budgets to do it on a custom basis for their own applications in-house.  "It is really a very novel approach."

With this latest release, Isaacson says, "Our parallel query engine is production now," enabling what the company calls its "go-fish queries."  This means "that if it is not a query that fits into a single shard, then we basically go to all the shards and get the information and consolidate it. It is really nice because it comes back to the user as a single query," he notes. Additionally, in this release, dbShards' replication and failover has been enhanced so it is "faster, more reliable and more manageable," and, says Isaacson,  "We have a complete set of management tools now that allow you to manage the dbShards infrastructure," as well as automated backup and restore capabilities.

With Familybuilder, dbShards initially broke the company's MySQL database into multiple shards, enabling it to handle millions of read/write transactions generated by hundreds of thousands of users who visit the site each day. Now fully deployed, dbShards has prepared the Family Tree application to grow its revenue by scaling to accommodate millions of additional users and cope with concurrent transactions and database requests. The current sharding configuration can handle many times more volume, and Familybuilder can simply add new shards as demand requires.

For more information about dbShards Version 2.2 and the Familybuilder deployment, go here.