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I think describing newsql databases as "just" hidden sharding is underselling them substantially. The hard part is in the details of distributed transactions an

• kevincox 4y ago
  Yup. Consistency is by far the biggest advantage. Sharding isn't incredibly hard but it makes every query think about it for consistency purposes. Often you have a natural sharding key and it isn't much of a concern at all (example isolated user accounts) but at some point you need to go cross-shard and it gets very complicated (or you give up consistency and you get complicated bugs). In theory a distributed SQL database can be a huge developer win because of this. Of course there are usually other tradeoffs to consider as well.