If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard of the Spider storage engine, but not used it yet.

While it has been available for some years now, I just simply haven’t used it before until now.

I suspect that has to do with ease of installation. Previously, one had to compile it with MySQL in order to use it, which excludes a lot of people. However, in MariaDB 10.0 (as of 10.0.4), it is very easy to add and use.

And with MariaDB 10.0.8 being declared RC, combined with Spider’s sheer usefulness, I only suspect its usage will become more and more widespread.

What is the Spider storage engine, and why will it be useful?

“The Spider storage engine is a storage engine with built-in sharding features. It supports partitioning and xa transactions, and allows tables of different MariaDB instances to be handled as if they were on the same instance. It refers to one possible implementation of ISO/IEC …