Last week I got a question about sharding using our Spockproxy.  The question was how can I create a query for the proxy so it effectively runs:

/*in shard 1*/
SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE f_key IN (a, b, c);

UNION

/*in shard 2*/
SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE f_key IN (d, e, f);

By design our proxy will not do this.  The whole point is to hide the sharding from the application.  Given a query it will either send the same query to all the shards and combine the results or only send that query to one shard when it can figure out that the results(s) can only come from one shard (because you specified the shard key in the where clause).

I did figure out a way it could be done using views but would this ever be desirable?  

Like “Hard Coding” where values are built into the code of your application I’ll call this technique “Hard …