Distributed Mnesia & Replication

Welcome to the final lesson on Mnesia! So far, we've explored Mnesia's fundamentals and how to manage data with transactions. Now, let's unlock its true power: distributed operation.

Distributed Mnesia allows your database to span multiple Erlang nodes, offering incredible benefits for fault tolerance and scalability. Imagine your data staying available even if some servers go down!

For Mnesia to operate across multiple nodes, it needs to know which nodes are part of its cluster. This is managed through an explicit node list.

• Each Mnesia instance on a node is aware of the other nodes.
• It uses Erlang's built-in distribution mechanism to communicate.
• Data can be replicated to or stored on specific nodes in this list.

Without this configuration, Mnesia would only run locally on a single node.