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 hav

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.