Indeed, it also calls them "slots":

> You can get higher concurrency by keeping more than one row and updating a random row... just choose a random slot and update it

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-mysql/...

You'll need 5.7 to make full use of JSON features; ditto for geo. MySQL 5.7 is still considered pretty new (GA for ~9 months) so many companies haven't upgraded yet. Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL do offer 5.7 though, if you want to try out these features.

Best MySQL resources are generally the manual [0],[1] and Percona's blog [2],[3]

As for MySQL table schema best practices, definitely a broader topic, but yes it tends to differ greatly from what's taught academically. Baron's book [4] is probably the best starting place -- it's a few versions old by this point, but most of the core recommendations around InnoDB tables and indexing in there still apply.

[0] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/spatial-extensions.ht...

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/json.html

[2] https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/02/03/new-gis-features-in-...

[3] https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/03/07/json-document-fast-l...

[4] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022343.do

Check out the book "High Performance MySQL" at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022343.do from chapter 9 and beyond it covers replication and high availability. All this for MySQL which is not event the shinning crown of RDBMS.

If you think that automatic sharding is the answer to handle high loads then your are in for a very exciting surprise specially when things go awry and all that missing ACID compliance comes knocking...