I've just returned from the MySQL Conference 2009 in Santa Clara where CodeFutures launched the beta of dbShards Cloud Edition. It was great to see such a good turnout at the show (I heard that there were between 1,500 and 2,000 attendees) despite the state of the economy. It was also great to see how many companies are either implementing sharding or considering sharding for their applications. There seems to be much greater awareness of sharding than there was just one year ago and people I met understood that a shared-nothing approach offers the best possible performance and scalability. The one common concern about adopting sharding is that it introduces complexity into the application, but using a packaged solution such as dbShards this is much less of an issue.