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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Accelerating Query Performance: The Benefits of TiDB’s In-Memory Engine (IME)

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 […]

Time’s Up! How TiDB Efficiently Handles Expired Data

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 […]

Unleashing 50x Performance: In-Depth Analysis of TiDB DDL Framework Optimizations

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 […]

Blazing-Fast Cluster Recovery: How TiDB 8.1 Redefines Large-Scale Data Restoration

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 […]
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