Distributed Data with ETS & Mnesia

In large-scale Erlang systems, data often needs to be shared and synchronized across multiple nodes. This is crucial for building fault-tolerant and scalable applications.

Imagine a chat application where user sessions or message queues need to be accessible even if one server fails. Distributed data stores make this possible by allowing data to live beyond a single process or node.

ETS stands for Erlang Term Storage. It's a powerful, built-in in-memory key-value store. Think of it as a super-fast hash table directly integrated into the Erlang runtime.

• Extremely fast for read/write operations.
• Can store any Erlang term (integers, atoms, lists, tuples, PIDs, etc.).
• Process-safe: multiple processes can access the same table concurrently.