OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results.

The OpenSearch description document format can be used to describe a search engine so that it can be used by search client applications.

The OpenSearch response elements can be used to extend existing syndication formats, such as RSS and Atom, with the extra metadata needed to return search results.

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you're interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on