[lizztheblizz]

Depends. Have any examples of "normal" sharded MySQL databases?

EDIT: To clarify, sharding is not a standard feature included in Community Edition MySQL. Over the years, there have been various Oracle-initiated attempts at providing it as an enterprise scaling strategy through MySQL (NDB) Cluster, MySQL Fabric, etc., but these have either ended up having limited applicability outside very specific use cases and are not widely in use.

Most large MySQL users (e.g. Facebook or YouTube) ended up rolling their own frameworks, like Vitess, which has since been open sourced and adapted to more diverse environments. Until that became more accessible, though, the rest of the world mostly made do with wobbly multi-master setups relying on circular replication, behind some kind of proxy, or had to implement the sharding logic itself into their application code.

[Aeolun]

Damn, I never knew this. I think the first time I ever needed sharding it was just available in whatever version of MySQL we were using at the time (through some plugin, presumably). I never needed it again and ever since just assumed it was the default.

Thanks for the correction!