I'd tried sni.ps before - it's a very cool clip management and embedding service by the Project Opus folks. It's gotten REALLY nice. Let's see if I can embed a citation:
Partitioning of Data
Partitioning of Data
This involves moving different tables or different parts of the database into different databases, and normally on different servers. This allows you to scale an application by adding more database servers, so your data could be spread across several servers.
HyperDB allows you to specify which data resides on which servers.
And Jim will love this - it's powered by a Drupal website...