In the realm of databases, relational database management systems (RDBMS) like Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL have been prevalent for decades, leveraging SQL as their lingua franca. However, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Apache Cassandra emerged in the mid-2000s, initially positioned as alternatives to RDBMS but later evolving to coexist alongside them. The distinction between SQL and NoSQL has blurred, with many NoSQL databases now incorporating ACID transactions. NewSQL databases were introduced to address scalability challenges, with two main flavors: automated data sharding on top of monolithic databases or new distributed storage engines designed from the ground up. With the rise of cloud-native applications and global distribution, geo-distributed SQL databases have emerged as a solution, offering horizontal scalability, resilience, and support for fully-distributed ACID-compliant transactions. Cloud-native databases like YugabyteDB are now leading the pack, enabling multi-API, multi-model application development on top of a single transactional storage engine.