What Is Distributed SQL?

Chapter 3. Distributed SQL in Action

In Chapter 1 we established the why of distributed SQL. In Chapter 2 we put some rigor around the what. In this chapter, we’ll look at examples of distributed SQL in action across three industries: telecom, retail, and gaming. Base features laid out earlier in the report will see real-world action. There’s a lot of nuance here; for example, you’ll notice how high availability is key to both retail and telecom, but for very different business reasons. Similarly, sometimes scale is valuable because a company may not know when spikes occur; other times, scale is a primary value because it can be predicted. Each value that distributed SQL brings to the table varies in each real-world application, and each industry requires a unique mix of them.

After we look at some industry examples, we’ll briefly discuss a couple of themes that run across them.

Industry Example: Telecom

In our examples, telecom means both internet service provider (ISP) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider. For today’s world, both are absolutely vital. Companies in both subspaces are choosing distributed SQL solutions to give their customers dependable service.

Usage

A major US telecommunications company uses a virtual customer support agent as the triage point for customer requests. This virtual agent was originally built based on a standard RDBMS—which caused major pain when a cloud provider connectivity issue made the database unavailable. To mitigate this in ...