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 […]
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 […]
Scaling Beyond Limits: How EasyPost Future-Proofed Its Infrastructure with Distributed SQL
When legacy infrastructure hits its limits, innovation isn’t just a choice — it’s a necessity. For EasyPost, a leader in logistics technology, scaling up meant more than just more hardware. It meant a fundamental shift in their approach to data. In this customer story, we explore how EasyPost’s infrastructure team, led by Head of Infrastructure […]
Optimizing Backup Verification: How to Enhance Performance and Reliability in TiDB
With the release of TiDB 8.5, TiDB BR (Backup & Restore) has made a significant change: Full-table checksum verification is now turned off by default during backups. This update boosts backup efficiency by cutting unnecessary overhead while keeping data integrity intact. In this post, we’ll explain how TiDB has optimized backup verification, the expected performance […]
TiDB Index Optimization: Detect and Remove Unused Indexes for Better Performance
Indexes are essential for optimizing database query performance, reducing the need to scan large amounts of data. However, as applications evolve, business logic changes, and data volume grows, indexing inefficiencies emerge. This leads to: Left unaddressed, these indexing issues can cause higher storage costs, degraded performance, and operational inefficiencies. That’s why regular index audits are […]