Engineering

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 […]

Every quarter, our Discord and Slack communities surface questions that reflect what teams are actually working through. These include such topics as migration blockers, cost modeling unknowns, and the everyday friction of running a distributed database in production. Between October and December 2025, we collected the most in-depth discussions and distilled them into the themes […]

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 […]

According to the 2025 Kubernetes Cost Benchmark Report, average CPU utilization across Kubernetes clusters is approximately 10 percent. For many teams, that raises an obvious question: why is database utilization so low? The answer is not poor engineering. It is structural. Modern cloud-native database scaling models are built around peak capacity planning. To protect availability, […]

I know too many people drowning in student debt. A friend got her Master’s in Music from an expensive private school. She’s $120k in debt and works at Starbucks. Another guy I know got a business degree from a school that costs $50k a year. He’s doing the same job he could’ve gotten without the […]

Editor’s Note: At PingCAP, we build distributed systems (TiDB), but we appreciate elegant engineering at any scale. OpenClaw demonstrates a perfect use case for local-first RAG databases: when you need zero-ops, total data privacy, and instant startup for a single user, SQLite is a highly pragmatic choice. We believe in choosing the right tool for […]