Scaling Metadata Management: Innovations in TiDB’s Placement Driver
As TiDB scales to support larger deployments, its core metadata management hub—the Placement Driver (PD)—must evolve to meet growing demands. This post explores how TiDB addresses PD’s challenges, including scalability bottlenecks, stability risks, and storage limitations. In this post, we’ll cover: Whether you’re optimizing large-scale deployments or curious about TiDB’s architecture, this post highlights how […]
How Flipkart Scales Over 1M QPS with Zero Downtime Maintenance
This customer story is based on a technical presentation by the Flipkart engineering team at TiDB User Day India 2025. Flipkart is one of India’s largest e-commerce platforms, serving millions of users across a complex ecosystem. Its operations span the full customer journey, from product discovery to order placement, and finally to delivery. This includes […]
Building Intelligent AI Agents: A New Data Application Paradigm with MCP and TiDB
We’ve entered the Agentic AI Era—a new phase where large language models (LLMs) go beyond understanding instructions to actively making decisions and autonomously executing tasks. In this landscape, the ability to efficiently integrate LLMs with external systems, particularly databases, has become critical for building truly powerful AI applications. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged […]
Why Fresh Data, SQL, and Unified Platforms Are Your Competitive Edge for AI Applications
Delivering truly personalized AI experiences is complex. It requires Large Language Models (LLMs) to access relevant personal or organizational information and possess the intelligence to translate needs into tangible actions. This pursuit has been a key direction in GenAI application development. With foundational models like GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V2 becoming genuinely practical, their reasoning and execution […]
ACID at Scale: Why MySQL Needs a Distributed SQL Alternative
MySQL’s simplicity and robust single-instance ACID guarantees have made it a developer favorite for years. The familiar ease of use, quick installation, and a rich ecosystem contribute to its widespread adoption. InnoDB, its default storage engine, ensures Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID), which are vital for data integrity and defined as follows: However, this […]
Managing Resource Isolation: Optimizing Performance Stability in TiDB
In complex business environments, resource isolation is critical to ensure stability, performance, and efficient resource utilization. TiDB offers robust features for resource control, allowing you to achieve efficient resource isolation across multiple levels: This blog focuses on best practices for flow-based resource isolation, helping you understand how to control and isolate workloads at runtime without […]
Ten Years On, We Set Off Again: My Journey with TiDB
From day one, PingCAP has been a company built by and for builders. In this special 10-year reflection, our very first employee and SVP of Product & Engineering shares the raw, unfiltered journey behind TiDB—from the first lines of Go code to running mission-critical workloads across the globe. We hope this inspires the next generation […]
Let Your Database Recommend the Indexes: Smarter Tuning in TiDB
Index tuning has always been one of the most effective ways to speed up database queries—but it’s also one of the most time-consuming and complex. When we first introduced the TiDB Index Advisor as a command-line tool in a previous blog, our goal was to simplify index selection for real-world workloads. Now, with TiDB 8.5, […]
Scaling 3 Million Tables: How TiDB Powers Atlassian Forge’s SaaS Platform
Atlassian, a global leader in project management and team collaboration, offers widely adopted products like Jira, Confluence, and Forge. As Atlassian’s SaaS platforms scale, so too do their data infrastructure needs, such as scaling millions of database tables efficiently and cost-effectively. That’s where TiDB comes in. This post explores how TiDB empowers Atlassian’s Forge platform […]
TiDB Performance Hotspots: How to Identify and Fix Issues Using Top SQL
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 […]
TiDB Spring Launch 2025: Breaking Barriers to AI and SaaS Scale with One Unified Platform
Teams are building more ambitious systems—AI, SaaS, global scale—and running into familiar challenges along the way: Complexity, performance, and reliability. TiDB Spring Launch 2025 is a major step forward in solving those problems. It introduces new product capabilities designed to make hard things—like scaling SaaS platforms or powering AI features—feel a lot more manageable, all […]
Write Latency, Solved: TiKV’s Journey to Smoother Performance
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 […]