MySQL Cluster does an automatic sharding/partitioning to the tables across data nodes, enabling databases to scale horizontally to serve read and write-intensive workloads, but what is the default sharding key used in partitioning the data?
According to the recent update (Oct, 2016) of the MySQL Cluster white paper, primary key is the default sharding key:

By default, sharding is based on hashing of the primary key, which generally leads to a more even distribution of data and queries across the cluster than alternative approaches such as range partitioning.

However, that is not the case in all MySQL Cluster versions so far!
In this post, I’ll do some test cases on MySQL Cluster (of 4 datanodes) to confirm the default sharding key. Continue reading →