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Supply chains are all about coordination among multiple (often disparate) participants and processes to deliver a complex product. Hence the success of a supply chain depends in part on the collaboration among the participants which requires trust in each other’s operations. A breakdown of the integrity of the supply chain can compromise the final product and have damaging operational, financial and brand consequences.
Some organizations are turning to distributed blockchain technologies to ensure the integrity in their supply chain systems. However, due to their distributed nature, blockchains are complex, introduce completely new programming languages and platforms, offer limited data management capabilities, and poor performance. Many supply chain systems use centrally managed data, and a distributed infrastructure of a blockchain is a heavyweight solution for such systems.
Ledger in Azure SQL brings the benefits of blockchains to relational databases, which are much easier and cheaper to deploy and maintain, provide rich data management capabilities, offer much better performance, and are more environmentally friendly, compared to distributed blockchain technologies. Ledger cryptographically links the current and historical data in a blockchain structure, to make the data tamper-evident and verifiable.
Ledger provides a great solution to ensure integrity in supply chain systems that use centrally managed data, allowing business partners to independently verify data integrity. One of the customers using ledger to reinforce the security of their supply chain is Lenovo.
Watch the below video and read Lenovo's case study to learn more.
To learn more about ledger:
- Explore the Azure SQL Database ledger documentation
- Read the ledger whitepaper
- Try the ledger demo/sample at GitHub
- Watch the Data Exposed episode (video) on ledger
- Listen to the ledger podcast