Engineering

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 […]

AI coding agents are excellent at producing code that “works on my machine”. But as every database engineer knows, there is a massive gap between a query that runs in a local Docker container and one that survives in a high-concurrency production environment. We keep seeing the same issues arise when agents generate SQL based […]

I’m a fast talker, but standard tools treat every platform like a dry JIRA ticket. To fix this, I dived into Chrome extension development to create Speak It: a voice-to-text app that learns your style without recording your secrets. Using privacy-first AI, the system maps a “fingerprint” of your speech—focusing on formality and sentence length—rather […]

Managing memory in a high-performance database environment isn’t just about having enough RAM; it’s about how that RAM is organized. For SREs and DBAs, understanding the nuances of the Linux kernel’s memory management can be the difference between a smooth-running system and unpredictable tail latency. In this post, we’ll break down the core mechanics of […]

Dive deep into two popular MySQL alternatives and discover why TiDB is a better option for extreme scalability and real-time analytics.