Engineering

Hotspots are silent performance killers in distributed databases. They rarely trigger alerts — instead, they quietly erode throughput, increase tail latency, and leave your engineering team guessing. If you’re running TiDB at scale and suddenly one TiKV node is running hot while others sit idle, you’re likely facing a hotspot. In this post, we’ll walk […]

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 […]

With the release of TiDB 8.5, TiDB BR (Backup & Restore) has made a significant change: Full-table checksum verification is now turned off by default during backups. This update boosts backup efficiency by cutting unnecessary overhead while keeping data integrity intact. In this post, we’ll explain how TiDB has optimized backup verification, the expected performance […]

If you’ve ever struggled with slow queries or high resource consumption in your database, you’re not alone. Many databases, including those built on Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), face query performance degradation over time. While MVCC is essential for managing concurrent access, excessive historical data scanning can slow down queries and overload system resources — a […]

Managing large-scale data efficiently is a critical challenge for modern databases, especially when dealing with time-sensitive data that can quickly become outdated. Starting from TiDB 6.5 and becoming generally available in TiDB 7.0, TTL (Time To Live) automates the deletion of expired data, offering a powerful, customizable solution for maintaining data freshness while minimizing operational […]

Managing schema changes in traditional databases often leads to downtime, blocking, and operational complexity. TiDB has long simplified this process with its online DDL capabilities, allowing developers to evolve their databases without disrupting applications. As user bases and data volumes have surged, however, index creation was increasingly becoming a performance bottleneck. To address this, we […]

Backup and restore are critical for ensuring business continuity, with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) serving as a key metric for assessing restore performance. As TiDB continues to grow in popularity for its scalability, many users have datasets reaching hundreds of terabytes (TBs). That means the challenge of ensuring a fast RTO for such large […]

Business growth is an exciting milestone, bringing more users, transactions, and opportunities to innovate. However, with growth comes significant technical challenges, such as: In this blog, we’ll explore how TiDB, an open-source distributed SQL database, addresses these business growth challenges. We’ll also walk through real-world examples from companies such as Bolt and Flipkart. Bolt: A […]

In the era of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), it’s essential to optimize resource use and scalability in databases. Multi-tenant architecture meets these needs by allowing a single database instance to serve multiple customers, or tenants. This ensures each tenant’s data remains isolated and secure, leading to enhanced cost efficiency, simplified management, […]

This blog introduces Web3Bench, a hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) benchmark that addresses earlier limitations. Web3Bench is based on real-world Web3 use cases that utilize HTAP. Our data model is a simplified version of the decentralized blockchain Ethereum. We leverage a sample data set from Ethereum to build a scale factor-based data generator. The workload in […]

We just built Open Source Benchmark, an innovative GPT designed to streamline open-source software (OSS) comparisons. Powered by our own data APIs and third-party APIs, this GPT analyzes two repositories and offers instant insights for tech decision-making. Open the GPT now and click PyTorch vs Tensor to see how it works in action.   How […]

Businesses often struggle to ensure smooth database connections during scaling and upgrades. Frustrations can surface from underused instances after scaling out, disruptions when scaling in, and potential disconnections during upgrades. While connection pools and long-lived connections offer stability, they can cause issues in fluid environments where databases need to adapt quickly. This leads to increased […]