Date: Nov 20, 2025
Time: 10:00 – 10:40 AM PT
FinTech systems cannot pause for maintenance or ride out failures. In this hands-on lab, we show you how to architect for continuous availability while scaling on demand and shipping change without customer impact.
You’ll explore how TiDB’s distributed SQL engine, Raft-based replication, and online DDL keep payments and ledgers running through traffic spikes, releases, and node failures. A live demo will then walkthrough how to ensure zero downtime via seamless online rolling upgrades with uninterrupted client sessions.
What you’ll learn:
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- How TiDB delivers horizontal scale and strong consistency for regulated workloads
- Executing online DDL on hot tables without customer impact
- How Raft leader election and automatic failover preserve availability during incidents
- Capacity planning, hot-partition avoidance, and SLO guardrails
- Streaming operational data with TiCDC for risk analytics and reporting
- Implementing PITR and running recovery drills without maintenance windows
Speaker:
Stephen Thorn, Principal Solutions Engineer, PingCAP
Stephen Thorn is a Principal Solutions Engineer at PingCAP, where he helps enterprises modernize data infrastructure with distributed SQL and cloud-native architectures. Previously a Solutions Engineer at Percona, he’s worked hands-on with several database technologies at massive scale, designing high-availability, high-performance systems. Stephen also served as the founding Solutions Engineer at a Kubernetes startup and supported mission-critical workloads for a federal government data provider. Before that, he served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer, leading Marines in chaotic, austere environments. Stephen graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in Information Technology.