I sometimes wonder if the "cloud first" mentality has led people to distributing databases way way before the need for it. I get that "big data" is in the in th

I sometimes wonder if the "cloud first" mentality has led people to distributing databases way way before the need for it. I get that "big data" is in the in thing right now, but non-distributed databases still scale to huge amounts of data. I suspect there are plenty of services running over distributed servers instead of a couple of appropriately sized principal/witness servers. Beyond that, it's better to distribute by splitting databases across services or uses, so instead of having a mono-database running over a cluster, it's better for example to have an OLTP database and a separate OLAP database for reporting. It's easy to split those out to different servers rather than having a mono-database distributed over a cluster. Going beyond that, data partitioning is more sane, so you partition the data so that different sets of non-interacting data are in different places. So you can for example partition by customer, then each of those partitions can be arranged to different servers where appropriate for load. There shouldn't be a need to have transactions hitting more than one partition at once when partitioned correctly. And none of that breaks referential integrity.