Johannes Schlüter has a new post to his site today showing how to use the MySQL Fabric functionality to do sharding in your PHP application. The MySQL Fabric (recently released) is "an integrated environment for managing a farm of MySQL server supporting high-availability and sharding."

As this release of Fabric put the focus on sharding, this is what I want to show here, too. A general introduction to MySQL Fabric and its sharding features can be found on VN's blog so I'll be quite fast in some areas, for details please refer to the documentation and the mentiond blogs.

He walks you through the installation of the support for Fabric and how to configure it for storage. He then creates some groupings/shards with the "mysqlfabric" command line tool and sets up the sharding rules. Next up is the installation of the mysqlnd_ms extension for PHP and configuring it via a JSON file and in the php.ini. A sample test script is included showing how to create a table, insert a record and pull it back out from the sharded setup.