@jcrespo: A few questions about setting up the new tables on Beta Cluster:

• Would it make sense to set up the new tables in the wikishared database or should we create a new database for this?
• If a new database makes more sense, which shard should that database live on?
• Are the db shards on Beta Cluster set up the same as in production?

@jcrespo: A few questions about setting up the new tables on Beta Cluster:

I am not the owner at Beta, some people at RelEng is, so make sure to add the relevant people here. Maybe @dduvall or someone else can answer you better. The following are to best of my knowledge, but are not authoritative in any case:

• Would it make sense to set up the new tables in the wikishared database or should we create a new database for this?

Don't add things to wikishared. This will be on production on a separate set of servers, so it cannot be on the same database as the others, because it will be physically separated.

• If a new database makes more sense, which shard should that database live on?

If this was production, I would call this x2.

Are the db shards on Beta Cluster set up the same as in production?

I doubt it, I think there is only 2 db servers on Beta. Even if x1 existed, it would probably point to the same servers, which means replication will be difficult to setup on Beta. Replication from localhost seems like a really bad idea. If this want to really test the functionality, I would suggest to create, even if temporarily, at least a new VM for it. Once we know it works, we can simplify the setup, but I would strongly suggest starting with a new hosts only for it (not because it is dangerous/requires resources, but because it will heavily depend on replication to work).