When your data sizes starts reaching Big Data limits sharding becomes a necessity. However sharding can also be needed for other reasons like dealing with huge amounts of traffic etc. There are multiple ways to shard and where you shard has a big impact to what you can do and on the performance. Spider is a sharding engine that allows sharding behind the storage engine layer, thus being able to use the optimizer to also optimez other queries than primary key lookups. This talk will go into the details on how spider works and what you can acheive by using spider as a sharding solution compared to other potential sharding strategies