Engineering

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you’ve ever struggled with slow queries or high resource consumption in your database, you’re not alone. Many databases, including those built on Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), face query performance degradation over time. While MVCC is essential for managing concurrent access, excessive historical data scanning can slow down queries and overload system resources — a […]

TiDB focuses on simplicity, transparency, and high availability, providing a robust foundation for distributed SQL workloads. While concerns about cross-shard queries and availability zone (AZ) outages are valid, TiDB’s architecture minimizes these risks, ensuring reliable and efficient application performance. However, when comparing TiDB and Vitess — an orchestrator for sharded MySQL instances — the architectural differences […]

Managing large-scale data efficiently is a critical challenge for modern databases, especially when dealing with time-sensitive data that can quickly become outdated. Starting from TiDB 6.5 and becoming generally available in TiDB 7.0, TTL (Time To Live) automates the deletion of expired data, offering a powerful, customizable solution for maintaining data freshness while minimizing operational […]

Managing schema changes in traditional databases often leads to downtime, blocking, and operational complexity. TiDB has long simplified this process with its online DDL capabilities, allowing developers to evolve their databases without disrupting applications. As user bases and data volumes have surged, however, index creation was increasingly becoming a performance bottleneck. To address this, we […]

Backup and restore are critical for ensuring business continuity, with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) serving as a key metric for assessing restore performance. As TiDB continues to grow in popularity for its scalability, many users have datasets reaching hundreds of terabytes (TBs). That means the challenge of ensuring a fast RTO for such large […]

It’s that time of year again for a look back at the database industry. 2024 wasn’t so much about groundbreaking database technologies, but rather the explosive growth of AI-plus-data applications. That said, core database tech hasn’t remained idle either, as cloud infrastructure became the de facto standard for deployment.  So, without further adieu, here are […]