A serverless database is an innovative approach that embodies the principles of serverless computing, offering significant benefits such as reduced operational management, elastic scaling, built-in resilience, and consumption-based billing. This model allows developers to focus on coding rather than server maintenance, as server management tasks are abstracted and automated. Serverless databases are designed to be always available and fault-tolerant, providing instant access even during backend failures. They scale automatically based on workload demands, ensuring cost efficiency by charging only for the resources consumed. Additionally, serverless databases must meet specific requirements, including surviving failure domains, supporting geographic scale, offering transactional guarantees, and maintaining the elegance of relational SQL. This paradigm shift aligns with distributed systems principles and is gaining popularity as it simplifies operations and reduces costs, ultimately transforming databases into a seamless service akin to a SQL API in the cloud.