Chapter 1. The Distributed Database Landscape
You’ve probably heard the pitch before: a database that scales horizontally, survives regional outages, and still gives you ACID transactions with a SQL interface. It sounds like the database equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. And for years, it mostly was—a promise that came with so many asterisks that most teams stuck with what they knew: a single PostgreSQL or MySQL instance, maybe with a read replica or two, and a well-rehearsed failover runbook.
But the landscape has genuinely shifted. Google proved with Spanner that you could build a globally consistent database. CockroachDB and YugabyteDB brought similar ideas to the open-source world. TiDB tackled the problem from the MySQL side. And now Amazon Aurora DSQL has entered the conversation with a fundamentally different approach: what if the distributed database was truly serverless—no nodes to provision, no clusters to tune, no replicas to manage?
This chapter sets the stage. Before we dive into DSQL’s specifics, ...
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