Why Legacy SQL Is a Scaling Time Bomb: How Distributed SQL Defuses Future Risks
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 […]
5 Reasons Why Amazon Aurora Fails to Scale Large, Complex Workloads
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 […]
Scaling Observability: Why TiDB Moved from Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics
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 Scalability Crisis: How Distributed SQL Unlocks Innovation with Zero Downtime Operations
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 […]
How Conga Transforms Revenue Lifecycle Management with TiDB
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 Call for Proposals (CFP) is Now Open!
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 […]
Improving TiDB Hash Joins: Up to 5× Faster with No Tuning Required
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 […]
TiDB Runtime Dashboard: A Detailed Analysis with Use Cases
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]