I am a database newbie, what are it's pros and cons over postgres?
Slightly limited but distributed SQL queries can run across all nodes to speed up access or scan lots of data - or you can choose something like a customer_id to shard all the tables the same way so that all data for that customer would be on the same node, allowing for full SQL syntax and features on data of that node (because it would just be a regular postgres server).
For a data-warehouse/fast-realtime scenario, I would also recommend MemSQL although it is proprietary.