In the 1990s I spent a few years studying requirements on databases used in 3G telecom networks. The main requirement was centered around three keywords, Latency, Throughput and Availability. In this blog post I will focus on Availability.

If a telecom database is down it means that no phone calls can be made, internet connections will not work and your app on your smartphone will cease to work. So more or less impacting each and everyone's life immediately.

The same requirements on databases now also start to appear in AI applications such as online Fraud detection, self-driving cars, smartphone apps.

Availability is measured in percent and for telecom databases the requirement is to reach 99.9999% availability. One often calls this Class 6 availability where 6 is the number of nines in the availability percentage.

Almost every database …