Engineering

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 […]

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 […]

Founded in 2014 in Singapore, Ninja Van is a leading last-mile logistics provider operating across six countries in Southeast Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand — with nationwide coverage in each market. Ninja Van’s platform handles logistics for top-tier e-commerce players such as Amazon and Lazada. Offering services that span from parcel […]

Whether you’re processing thousands of concurrent writes per second or scaling out infrastructure to meet a burst in demand, latency spikes can undermine user experience, reliability, and trust. At PingCAP, we obsess over these details. Our mission is to help teams build and scale confidently on distributed SQL. This post highlights how a subtle performance […]

TiDB is a powerful, open-source distributed SQL database built for handling both transactional and analytical workloads. With its MySQL compatibility, horizontal scalability, and real-time HTAP capabilities, it’s designed for modern, cloud-native architectures. In this distributed SQL tutorial, we’ll walk you through setting up a local TiDB cluster for development and testing in just a few […]

Data loss can occur while using a database for various reasons, such as operator error, malicious hacker attacks, and server hardware failures. Backup and recovery technology is the final line of defense to ensure data can still be restored and used after such losses.  TiDB, as a native distributed database, fully supports various backup and […]

Author: Xiaolei Dai, Database lead at Zhihu Efficient and reliable data migration is crucial for large-scale online services. Zhihu, one of China’s largest knowledge-sharing platforms, recently undertook the complex task of online migration for dozens of TiDB databases, totaling petabytes (PB) of data. This blog post, based on the expertise of Zhihu’s database lead, Dai […]

JuiceFS is an open-source, cloud-native distributed file system that allows users to freely choose the backend storage engine. This post introduces how to use TiKV as a metadata engine for JuiceFS.

As a key-value database, TiKV has much higher performance requirements than a regular application, so tracing tools must have minimal impact. Learn how we trace TiKV requests while impacting performance less than 5%.

TiFS is a distributed file system built upon TiKV. It is partition tolerant, strictly consistent, and most efficient for reading and writing small files or other complicated file system operations.

This is the fourth episode of the Rust Compile Time series. It discusses some factors that cause Rust to build slow, including LLVM, compiler architecture, and linking.

The third episode of the Rust Compile Time series discusses why Rust's compilation units are so big and how that affects compile times.