MySQL applications hit scaling ceilings: hot shards, schema-change windows, and operational sprawl from too many replicas. In this use case lab, we’ll show you how to modernize MySQL workloads onto TiDB to unlock horizontal scale, online schema evolution, and operational simplicity without major code rewrites.
You’ll see how TiDB’s MySQL-compatible, distributed SQL architecture separates compute and storage, scales linearly, and keeps applications online during migrations and upgrades. We’ll walk through how TiDB scales a 300TB+ cluster running two different workloads to showcase key capabilities such as the database’s columnar store and Resource Groups.
What you’ll learn
- How to lift-and-shift MySQL schemas and data with minimal code changes using TiDB’s MySQL compatibility and migration tooling.
- Executing online DDL on hot tables without downtime and reducing lock contention under peak load.
- Horizontally scaling reads and writes by distributing data automatically, with elastic capacity and no application-side sharding.
- Strategies for zero- or near-zero-downtime cutover, verification, and safe rollback.
- Consolidating OLTP + operational analytics via TiDB’s columnar engine and secondary indexes to simplify your stack.
Speaker:
Ben Sherrill, Senior Sales Engineer, TiDB
Ben Sherrill is a Senior Sales Engineer at TiDB, where he focuses on competitive differentiation, query optimization, performance testing, and integrations across the broader ecosystem. Backed by a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure and networking, Ben brings deep technical expertise in distributed SQL and NewSQL, system design, and cloud architecture. He frequently works across Kubernetes environments, data streaming platforms, infrastructure as code (IaC), and observability stacks to help customers unlock the full potential of TiDB.