Fauna is a distributed document-relational database that combines the flexibility of JSON documents with the relationships and querying power of traditional relational databases. It offers a modern transactional database with ACID guarantees, foreign keys, views, and joins, allowing developers to structure their data in a way that makes sense for their applications without complicated workarounds. Unlike traditional relational databases, Fauna stores data in unstructured documents that can reference each other based on attributes, eliminating the need for complex join logic in application code. The database also provides strong security features, including a powerful combination of role-based access control and attribute-based access control. Fauna's query language, FQL, is Turing Complete, allowing developers to craft complex queries that execute in the context of a transaction, ensuring consistency and performance. With its novel architecture, Fauna scales correctly without compromising on performance, making it an attractive choice for modern application development.