Oh, hey, Pingcap are the people behind TiDB: https://en.pingcap.com/products/tidb https://en.pingcap.com/products/tidb While this is kind of off topic (the tec

Oh, hey, Pingcap are the people behind TiDB: https://en.pingcap.com/products/tidb https://en.pingcap.com/products/tidb While this is kind of off topic (the tech is related), i really enjoy the idea behind their product - a database that is compatible with existing protocols (MySQL 5.7 connections in this case) but allows for horizontal scaling out of the box. While a single instance of MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL can go pretty far, being able to mostly delegate scaling to the actual software to get a distributed system going, without having to do lots of manual work is a great idea! Of course, there are also many pitfalls in regards to compatibility, but that's probably to be expected: https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility That said, this won't work for all circumstances, but i think that exploring such approaches is definitely worthy of the time!