13.1. When to Use Mnesia

Mnesia was originally built for integration in distributed, massively concurrent, soft real-time systems with high availability requirements (i.e., telecoms). You want to use Mnesia if your system requires the following:

• Fast key-value lookups of potentially complex data

• Distributed and replicated data across a cluster of nodes with support for location transparency

• Data persistency with support for fast data access

• Runtime reconfiguration of the table location and table features

• Support for transactions, possibly across a distributed cluster of nodes

• Data indexing

• The same level of fault tolerance as for a typical Erlang system

• Tight coupling of your data model to Erlang data types and to Erlang itself

• Relational queries that don’t have soft real-time deadlines