How does VoltDB differ from sharding MySQL?
VoltDB is designed from the top down to maximize parallelism and to abstract the partitioning from the client application. Sharding MySQL requires the client code to manage and access the individual shards as separate databases. Horizontal partitioning is integral to VoltDB — not a performance trade-off forced on application designers in exchange for loss of ACID-compliance, manageability, and increased complexity in the client application. Equally important, for OLTP applications, VoltDB provides significantly greater throughput than MySQL on comparable hardware configurations.
