Our previous post in this series “What is Distributed SQL?” highlights the common architectural principles as well as the business benefits of distributed SQL databases. In this post, we compare distributed SQL databases against NewSQL databases so that we can better understand their differences.
Before we dive into NewSQL, it is important to understand why NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Apache Cassandra came into prominence in the mid-to-late 2000s. They too were originally positioned as alternatives to SQL databases but fell short of their goal. SQL databases were monolithic at that time and the distributed nature of NoSQL was attractive to applications looking for scalability and resilience.