Google Developer Podcast Episode Six: The Hibernate Shards Open Source Project

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

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Max Ross and Maulik Shah were part of a core group that worked on the recently open sourced Hibernate Shards project.

In the podcast you will learn:

• What sharding is and what it means in the world of Hibernate
• How the word "shards" is common at Google (the equivalent of "smurf" in The Smurfs)
• Why you would want to shard your data to give you increased scalable performance
• How the Hibernate Shards project doesn't mess with the core APIs, allowing you to add sharding unobtrusively
  
• What you need to think about if you want to shard your data, and how you can design a schema that has a dimension that is easily sharded. This includes designing without complex relationships.
• How you could create a crazy project that shards data across multiple databases (as in, one mysql, one Oracle), but that would be crazy
• The various strategies to define how you retrieve your objects across the distributed data store
• How this compares with horizontal partitioning at the database level itself (e.g. new features in MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others)
• And much, much more.

For more information check out the Hibernate Shards homepage and the Google Group for discussion.

The new release that was mentioned in the podcast just went live. Congratulations to the team.

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You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

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Ode to Hibernate

Posted by Max Ross, Software Engineer

At each of my first two jobs I wrote an object-relational mapping framework in Java. The first was an abomination, the second merely rotten. I'm not the only engineer to have traveled this road. You write some code to generate SQL for your simple CRUD operations, you get one-to-many relationships working, and then you (and probably the rest of your team) spend a couple of months piling on hacks to support outer joins, many-to-many relationships, and all the other "extras" that are of course not "extras" at all. So imagine my mood the day a coworker introduced me to Hibernate (thanks Toby!). Just a few days of prototyping made it clear that Hibernate was an elegant solution to a hard problem, and that I would never again feel compelled to build an OR Mapping framework in Java. Joy.

As a fan of Hibernate it gives me great pleasure to announce the open-source availability of Hibernate Shards, a framework that adds support for horizontal partitioning (or in Google parlance, "sharding") to Hibernate Core. There are a number of reasons you might not keep all your data in a single relational database. Maybe you have too much data. Maybe a potential customer won't sign up for your service unless her company's data lives in its own database. Whatever your reasons, dealing with a sharded dataset adds complexity to the development and management of your application. Hibernate Shards is designed to encapsulate and reduce the complexity of building applications that work with sharded datasets.

I worked with Tomislav Nad and Maulik Shah (fellow Googlers who share my enthusiasm for Hibernate and Java infrastructure) to build Hibernate Shards as a 20 percent project. We think what we have now will be useful to the Java community, but this is most certainly not a polished release. There are functionality gaps to be filled, design warts to be smoothed, and bugs to be shaken out. We look forward to working with you as we address these issues and make Hibernate Shards even more powerful in the months to come. If you'd like to read more please visit the official Hibernate Shards website.

Happy Sharding!

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