Sure sharding is scaling, although there are several types of sharding, with varying degrees of scalability. Usually people use a combination of both database (which what I was talking about) and table sharding (w/ replication,clustering,etc.) to achieve scalability. I've encountered several highly-scalable db environments like these.

It's not application-transparent

There are several databases that have features that can make sharding transparent to your application.

and it's an operational nightmare

it depends on the RDBMS that you're using.