When building a large-scale and highly available payments processing application or service, what exactly do you need from your database? This sounds like a simple question, yet it is far from simple to answer when we’re talking about the data backbone for an enterprise-scale application that may need to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. A critical payments functionality needs to work correctly, even if other parts of the system go down, and every penny of every transaction must always be correct and instantly accounted for. The database also needs to scale out smoothly to keep pace with growing workloads. However, traditional SQL databases are reliable but complex and expensive to scale, while NoSQL databases provide strong consistency and ACID transactions, but fail to deliver scalability and high availability. Distributed SQL databases evolved to solve both scalability and consistency in a single database, providing powerful payments architectures that can handle high availability, geo-distribution, resilience, and consistency. When evaluating distributed SQL solutions for payment processing, it is essential to look for criteria such as high availability, strong consistency, scalability, disaster recovery, data geo-partitioning, and cloud agnosticism. A highly available database reduces downtime to the minimum by providing redundancy and failover mechanisms, ensuring that the system remains operational even if one or more components fail. Strong consistency ensures accurate recording and storage of every transaction, while scalability allows the database to handle increased traffic and maintain consistent performance. Disaster recovery features ensure quick data recovery in the event of a disaster, while data geo-partitioning makes it simple to comply with regulatory requirements. A truly multi-cloud database can operate single or multiple clusters that span multiple cloud providers while allowing your application to treat it like a single-instance database operating on a single cloud. The payment processing industry has become critical to the global economy, and choosing a highly-available distributed SQL database is essential for delivering secure and always-available payment experiences.