Engineering

If you’ve worked with relational databases long enough, you’ve almost certainly encountered stored procedures. They made sense in an era when network latency was expensive and applications were monolithic, but the world has moved on. In this post, we’ll look at why stored procedures are holding teams back and what a modern alternative looks like. […]

I was talking to Claude the other day — not about code or some technical problem. I was venting about work, about life. And Claude responded with something so personal, so specific to my situation, that I stopped and stared at it. It referenced my daughter by name. It brought up something I’d been stressed […]

What Is Multi-Writer Change Data Capture (CDC)? Change Data Capture (CDC) is a pattern for tracking and propagating data changes in real time, powering use cases like downstream synchronization, auditing, event streaming, and real-time analytics. In a single-writer CDC system (e.g., MySQL binlog, PostgreSQL WAL replication), one node handles all writes, producing a single sequential […]

For most of 2025, I found myself trapped in an exhausting loop. Every few days, I’d open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask the same question in slightly different ways: “Should I buy a house or keep renting?” The numbers seemed simple on the surface. My rent was $2,000 monthly. The mortgage would run around […]

As data volumes explode and applications demand real-time insights alongside high-throughput transactions, teams increasingly turn to distributed SQL databases that promise to handle both OLTP and OLAP workloads in a unified system. SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) and TiDB are leading players in this space, offering MySQL compatibility, horizontal scalability, and Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) capabilities. But […]

Distributed database backups are not just about coordinating the copying of files from multiple machines. It is capturing a single, consistent point in time across a system that is actively processing transactions. In TiDB, data is distributed across many nodes. Transactions use MVCC with a two-phase commit protocol. Transactions may touch multiple partitions at once. […]

If you have ever tuned a distributed database, you have probably adjusted obvious knobs: CPU, memory, replication factor, concurrency limits. But there is a quieter setting, one that rarely gets headlines, that has an outsized impact on performance, reliability, and operational sanity: Raft region size. In TiDB, via TiKV, region size refers to the size […]

AI coding agents are excellent at producing code that “works on my machine”. But as every database engineer knows, there is a massive gap between a query that runs in a local Docker container and one that survives in a high-concurrency production environment. We keep seeing the same issues arise when agents generate SQL based […]

Database upgrades are often a source of “performance anxiety.” Even with extensive testing, the gap between a sterile staging environment and the chaotic reality of production—characterized by shifting SQL parameters, bursty concurrency, and complex execution contexts—often leads to unexpected post-upgrade regressions. Traffic Replay on TiDB Cloud, an internal-only tool currently in development for a wider […]

Managing memory in a high-performance database environment isn’t just about having enough RAM; it’s about how that RAM is organized. For SREs and DBAs, understanding the nuances of the Linux kernel’s memory management can be the difference between a smooth-running system and unpredictable tail latency. In this post, we’ll break down the core mechanics of […]

Dive deep into two popular MySQL alternatives and discover why TiDB is a better option for extreme scalability and real-time analytics.

Every fast-growing SaaS platform eventually faces the same reality: scaling a single massive database becomes increasingly risky and expensive. At Bling (Part of the LWSA Group), a leading SaaS ERP platform serving the e-commerce markets in Brazil and Mexico, we hit this ceiling hard. Founded in 2009, Bling powers over 300,000 daily active users and […]