Thought Leadership

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. When enterprises talk about artificial intelligence, the attention usually points to models: larger parameters, faster inference, cheaper tokens. But we at next-gen database maker PingCAP contend that this framing misses the most consequential change now […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. In the past, we judged enterprise databases by how useful they were to people like us. We rated them on how well they helped architects create schemas, DBAs plan capacity, and analysts build queries.  We […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is republished with permission. The original version is available here. For decades, database designers have built distributed databases around the assumption that storage must live close to compute. The farther data travels over the network, the reasoning goes, the greater the potential for delay. Local […]

Reducing P999 latency in distributed databases is one of the hardest challenges in modern OLTP systems. A handful of slow requests can cascade across services, break SLOs, and directly impact business outcomes, especially in latency-sensitive environments like trading platforms and real-time applications. This is the challenge of tail latency. As systems scale, variability compounds: queueing […]

We’re excited to announce that TiDB Cloud Zero is now available in Public Preview. TiDB Cloud Zero is designed for a new generation of AI agents and developers who want instant access to a real production-grade database without the traditional onboarding friction. With TiDB Cloud Zero, you can: This blog walks through the entire flow from zero to a claimed […]

I give talks for a living. Developer relations means standing in front of rooms full of engineers and explaining complex technical concepts clearly enough that people walk away understanding something new. The problem is that I retain things far better when I explain them out loud than when I read about them. Most people do. […]

Adding an index has always been a sensitive operation: The challenge is clear: How do we build indexes that are fast, stable, and minimally disruptive, even at massive scale? TiDB X, the latest version of TiDB that introduces dedicated object storage, addresses this problem through a combination of three major innovations: In this blog, we explain why […]

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 […]