Engineering

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]