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Comment by 3iggy | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting a guerilla db instead of a cockroach db. Like serialising the db for dropbox. This is like a drifter camping on private land... you can say it isnt really decentralised but i'll just move somewhere else.

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The word used in the title and article is distributed not decentralized.

not challenging you, just asking, what is the distinction you're drawing between distributed and decentralized?

one idea would be, the db is completely synchronized on 3 redundant servers, so it's decentralized

each column of a table is stored on a different server, so it's distributed...?

I'd say distributed is about redundancy and scale within a single entity's infrastructure, where as decentralized implies multiple entities working together.

Decentralised implies lack of a global leader. However, each raft group has a leader, so you can only take this so far in a multi-group raft design.

This started me thinking about counterexamples, and I thought of DNS. And it occurred to me that it's actually a good way to phrase the argument against split horizon DNS: DNS was designed to be a distributed system (eg like DB replicas) and split horizon DNS abruptly changes one branch of it to a decentralized system (eg like Git) without updating its users.

Distributed and decentralized have specific meaning in the database space. Decentralized is like Bitcoin. No centralized servers or control. Distributed just means more than one server. The servers could even be located in the same rack or even on the same server in separate virtual machines and that would be distributed but not geographically distributed.

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