Hibernate Shards

From: http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/shards/reference/en/html/shards-shardstrategy.html

"It's important to note that if a multi-level object graph is being saved via Hibernate's cascading functionality, the ShardSelectionStrategy will only be consulted when saving the top-level object. All child objects will automatically be saved to the same shard as the parent. You may find your ShardSelectionStrategy easier to implement if you prevent developers from creating new objects at more than one level in your object hierarchy. You can accomplish this by making your ShardSelectionStrategy implementation aware of the top-level objects in your model and having it throw an exception if it encounters an object that is not in this set. If you do not wish to impose this restriction that's fine, just remember that if you're doing attribute-based shard selection, the attributes you use to make your decision need to be available on every object that gets passed to session.save()."

If you were to save child objects in a different shard, will you be able to enforce foreign key constraint? More generally, is it possible to enforce cross-shard integrity reference? Answer below (http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/shards/reference/en/html/shards-resharding.html):

"Unfortunately, the problem of changing object-shard mappings becomes even worse once we consider the fact that Hibernate Shards does not support cross-shard relationships (meaning FKs). This limitation prevents us from moving a subset of an object graph from one shard to another."