Wei Hu

Fault Tolerance and Consistency at Scale: Harnessing the Power of Distributed SQL Databases

How can your application survive a regional outage with zero data loss? Learn the replication and data distribution strategies for distributed SQL databases.

Fault Tolerance and Consistency at Scale: Harnessing the Power of Distributed SQL Databases
#1about 3 minutes

Understanding the fundamentals of distributed SQL databases

Distributed SQL databases store data across multiple locations while appearing as a single logical database to the application, addressing needs for fault tolerance, data sovereignty, and scalability.

#2about 2 minutes

How distributed databases abstract complexity from applications

Applications interact with a single logical database, which automatically routes single-shard requests directly and federates multi-shard requests to maintain transactional consistency.

#3about 2 minutes

Solving data sovereignty requirements without application changes

A distributed database can enforce data residency rules, like storing a country's citizen data locally, while still allowing global processing without requiring application rewrites.

#4about 1 minute

Achieving massive scalability and high fault tolerance

Use cases demonstrate how distributed databases support millions of transactions per second and provide fast, automatic failover with zero data loss for critical systems.

#5about 2 minutes

The architectural advantage of a SQL-native design

Databases architected for SQL from the ground up offer better performance and consistency compared to systems that layer a SQL interface on top of a NoSQL engine.

#6about 2 minutes

Optimizing performance by managing network latency costs

The inherent cost of network latency in distributed systems can be minimized by designing for data locality and reducing the amount of data sent between nodes.

#7about 5 minutes

Choosing the right data distribution method for your workload

Various data distribution methods like value-based, system-managed hashing, composite, and user-defined sharding allow you to tailor data placement to your application's access patterns.

#8about 4 minutes

Handling network failures with adaptive replication strategies

Raft-based replication provides fast, zero-data-loss failover, while adaptive synchronous and asynchronous modes help applications tolerate flaky, real-world network conditions.

#9about 2 minutes

Deploying across multi-cloud to avoid vendor lock-in

A distributed database can span multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers, allowing workloads to be shifted dynamically to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs.

#10about 3 minutes

The benefits of a converged database architecture

A converged database supports multiple data types and workloads in a single system, simplifying development and management compared to using many specialized databases.

#11about 1 minute

Key design patterns for distributed database applications

Effective application design involves selecting the right data distribution, co-locating related data, using duplicated tables for common data, and minimizing cross-shard transactions.

#12about 2 minutes

How to evaluate and choose a distributed SQL database

When selecting a distributed database, consider the completeness of its SQL implementation, its replication and deployment options, and whether it offers a converged architecture.

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