![]() ![]() When the Stranger at the end of Ultima I defeated Mondain and shattered the crystal, the crystal shards each held a refracted copy of Sosaria. What I ended up with is described here pretty well: that the evil wizard Mondain had attempted to gain control over Sosaria by trapping its essence in a crystal. I went off and read a whole mess of stuff about early Ultima lore and tried to come up with a fictional justification. No, “shards” came about specifically because when we realized we would need to run multiple whole copies of Ultima Online for users to connect to, we needed to come up with a fiction for it. But these were just called “servers” - like, Meridian 59 had bunches of them, and they had numbers instead of the common practice of names that is in use today. Parallel worlds each running the same static template database source, but evolving different runtime databases. ![]() ![]() It means database partitioning - of worlds. Anyway, I would be shocked if the term “shard” hadn’t been thrown around those offices… because in MMOs, of course, “shards” has a very specific meaning and history. In fact, I was quoted in Ludicorp’s business plan, and Stewart Butterfield had asked if I could be an advisor, but I couldn’t do it at the time because of my contract with Sony. In the comment thread at Lessons Learned, there’s mention of the term being used in 2006.įlickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending. Wikipedia has only had an article for a little while. Near as I can tell, a quick Google seems to say that the term came about because of a guy who worked at Friendster and Flickr, and seems to. It basically means running a bunch of parallel databases and looking into the right one, rather than trying to cram everything into one. ![]() What an odd term - “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way? Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. ![]()
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