3. Why use a distributed database?

Many organisations have branches and offices located across the country or even the world.

For example

It may be that each branch only needs to access their own data 90% of the time and only occasionally have a need to access remote information. On the other hand the central office needs to have an up to date version of all the data as well.

With a single central database, all queries and updates have to travel across a network. This may cause a heavy load on the system. It also means if the central database breaks or the network goes down, the entire organisation is affected.

A distributed database solves some of these issues.

With a distributed database, the central database is updated over night as a batch operation, but day-to-day work in the branches is carried out using the local portion of the database. If the network fails, then they can carry on as normal until it is fixed.