Engineering

Schema changes at scale can be a nightmare for SaaS applications. Slow index creation, long-running schema modifications, and scalability limits can disrupt operations, making real-time database evolution nearly impossible. TiDB has been tackling these challenges head-on, continuously pushing the boundaries of distributed SQL and DDL execution. Last year, we boosted index creation speed by 10x, enabling […]

Most companies suffer from a serious problem that limits their growth, and most don’t even know it. By the time they find out, it’s costing them millions in missed opportunities for product progress. It’s an infrastructure bottleneck — the root cause of most major issues with online applications. It causes downstream outages. It slows, and […]

Mark your calendars for October 7–8, 2025! TiDB SCaiLE 2025 heads to Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, where the future of distributed SQL, cloud-native scale, and AI-ready infrastructure comes into sharp focus . Let’s walk through a few of the key reasons why you shouldn’t miss this event. Experience a High-Impact Hybrid Scale Strategy TiDB SCaiLE (formerly […]

Have you ever seen two nearly identical SQL statements, differing only in date parameters or function variations, return similar results but with wildly different performance, sometimes by factors of 10 or 100? In real-world scenarios, we typically run the `EXPLAIN` statement to examine changes in the execution plan. But what if the execution plan doesn’t […]

Peak-moment failures are never polite. In 2015, Target’s website buckled on Cyber Monday while holiday carts sat idle. Delta canceled 1,300 flights when a single software outage rippled through critical systems. Analysts have shown that just 100 ms of extra latency trims roughly 1% of revenue, while Google observed a 20% traffic drop from a […]

As digital services become more intelligent, personalized, and data-intensive, the infrastructure supporting them must evolve as well. Today’s applications aren’t just storing data, they’re making real-time decisions on it, often across globally distributed environments with high user concurrency and strict uptime requirements. Amazon Aurora, a fully managed relational database from AWS, is a common choice […]

From the outset, Prometheus has served as a go-to tool for real-time performance metric collection, storage, querying, and observability in TiDB. Additionally, TiDB supports offline diagnostics using TiDB Clinic, which allows for replaying collected metrics to investigate historical issues. Figure 1. How TiDB Clinic provides offline diagnostics. However, as deployments scaled, so did the challenges […]

The FinTech industry is innovating at record speed. From embedded payments and AI-driven fraud detection to real-time credit scoring and risk analytics, financial services are becoming faster, smarter, and more personalized. But behind the scenes, many platforms are still powered by legacy databases and architectures built for a different era. Traditional systems are struggling to […]

Today’s businesses require seamless, scalable, and intelligent revenue lifecycle management solutions that can efficiently handle transactional and analytical workloads. Conga, a recognized leader in revenue management, is a pioneering company transforming the revenue operations space through a unique blend of cloud-agnostic architecture and cutting-edge hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) technology. We recently had the opportunity to […]

TiDB SCaiLE 2025, our new global conference for builders, operators, and AI infrastructure leaders shaping data-intensive systems, has officially opened its 2025 call for proposals (CFP). Formerly known as HTAP Summit, we’ve rebranded the event to reflect a bolder vision: helping leading companies scale smarter and build faster across distributed SQL, cloud-native architecture, and GenAI […]

Hash joins are a common performance bottleneck in SQL workloads, and TiDB was no exception. In TiDB 8.5, we introduced a brand-new hash join executor that improves performance across the board. This new engine fully exploits modern hardware with multi-threaded build, vectorized probe, and a more efficient spill strategy. Internal benchmarks show it doubles the […]

In TiDB’s runtime environment, issues related to memory management, garbage collection (GC) behavior, and lock contention at the Go Runtime level can significantly impact system stability and performance. However, such problems are often difficult to reproduce and analyze directly. As a result, high-quality runtime monitoring metrics are essential for effective troubleshooting and performance tuning. This […]