High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

• Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day (3225)

Flickr's lone database guy Dathan Pattishall made his excellent presentation available on how on how Flickr scales its backend to handle tremendous loads. Some of this information is available in Flickr Architecture, but the paper is so good it's worth another read. If you want to see sharding done right, at scale, take a look.