[dikei]

>> First time seeing someone call Spanner, CockroachDB, and YugabyteDB a "distributed key-value store with SQL"

That was the first thing come to my mind when I read the paper on Spanner and CockroachDB (haven't read the paper on YugabyteDB yet) though, and surely I'm not the only one.

[franckpachot]

Referring to Distributed SQL as a key-value store is like defining monolithic databases as a block storage. It reduces it to an internal structure. What makes it a database is what is on top: ACID transaction, full SQL features, relational tables, JSON document, foreign keys,... which are not available when sharding is done on top of SQL