Pinterest's exploration of distributed SQL at the 2020 Distributed SQL Summit was presented by Lianghong Xu, Engineering Manager & Tech Lead at Pinterest. The company has leveraged HBase as a columnar store and graph service capabilities in its infrastructure since 2012, but now faces challenges such as limited functionality, high complexity, data inconsistency, and tail inconsistency due to its reliance on the system. To address these issues, Pinterest is considering distributed SQL as a viable solution, with benefits including a unified storage backend, NoSQL scalability with SQL functionality, high availability, and the ability to tune consistency models based on workload. The company evaluated several distributed SQL systems, including YugabyteDB, which emerged as a promising solution.