Had plenty of conversations over the past few days in Mumbai with people about scale out strategies. About the difference between stateless and stateful portions of your application and about some ideas around choosing horizontal partitioning strategies.

Waddayaknow… I boot up RSS Bandit this morning and Dare has a great post on this.

Covers many of the things we discuss this week.

One of the things I focussed on a bunch this week is having some knowledge of the distribution of your data when choosing a good partition key.
You want a horizontal partitioning key (partition key in Azure Table Storage) that ideally DOESN’T fit a normal distribution.
Think of it like this. If you partition your data using say the first letter of the user name then you’re gonna end up with a whole bunch in your ‘S’ partition and not a lot in your ‘Z’ partition.

Anyway. A great post and well worth reading.

Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding Schemes