Benchmarks are hard to get right, and many articles touting benchmarks are actually benchmarketing, showcasing skewed outcomes to sell products. This post introduces some of the motivations for benchmarking and the common tools, and discusses a few things to keep in mind when benchmarking.

A new infrastructure pattern is emerging called the KOST stack (Kubernetes, Operator, Spark, TiDB). This blog post introduces each component of the KOST stack and cloud-native HTAP in the wild.

TiDB 3.0 is released! This blog post introduces some highlights of TiDB 3.0, including major features focused on stability, significant performance improvements in Sysbench and TPC-C benchmarks, a newly introduced component, and important features and improvements.

PingCAP has made a talent plan for training and/or evaluating students, new employees, and new contributors to TiDB and TiKV. This blog post gives a brief overview of training courses for this plan on writing distributed systems in Go and Rust.

This article shows how to efficiently develop high-quality applications with TiDB, an open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads and can serve as a scale-out MySQL database without manual sharding.

TiDB's first official Jepsen Test report is published. This post introduces some additional context to the test results and PingCAP's thoughts on what's next.

In this post, Kevin Xu shares the PingCAP team's experience and activities at Percona Live in Austin, including several technical sharing sessions and boosting friendship with people inside and outside PingCAP.

Learn to migrate and replicate data from MySQL, MariaDB and Amazon Aurora using TiDB Data Migration.

This post introduces design and implementation of Golang Failpoint.

Learn to deploy TiDB-Binlog with a simple TiDB cluster.

Our team at PingCAP is excited to announce that we are open-sourcing our own binlog implementation, TiDB-Binlog. TiDB-Binlog is a tool we’ve been developing in-house (until now) to collect binary log data from TiDB server and provide real-time data backup and replication.

This post introduces how the EE team at PingCAP tackled two Linux kernel bugs while testing TiDB Operator in K8s. PingCAP engineers also hope the K8s community, RHEL and CentOS can help fix these bugs thoroughly in the near future.

PingCAP has been an active member in the Rust community and one of the first production users of Rust in building TiKV. As part of being a co-organizer for the first RustCon Asia, PingCAP also contributed several topics in both keynote sessions and workshops.

As a RocksDB plugin for key-value separation, inspired by WiscKey, Titan is available for preview in TiDB 3.0. This post introduces the design and implementation of Titan.

As sales of Xiaomi smartphones continue to climb and the MIUI user base continues to grow, the Database Administration team at Xiaomi was having an increasingly hard time managing their MySQL database infrastructure until they adopted TiDB, an open source distributed hybrid transactional and analytical processing database created and supported by PingCAP. Now they also have plans to migrate additional workloads to TiDB in the future.

This post introduces some simple use cases of analytics queries where a MySQL DBA can expand their repertoire and answer some basic business questions by writing SQL queries with window functions.

With TiDB, BookMyShow has experienced increased uptime and availability, since TiDB automatically partitions and distributes data across the cluster. Meanwhile, operational and maintenance cost has been reduced by 30%. No engineer needs to be fully dedicated to database operations anymore. This post will introduce why BookMyShow chose TiDB over Greenplum by illustrating how TiDB solved their pain points.

The official TiDB Certification is now available in beta and an online exam is ready for you to sign up.

As our business boom, our team faced severe challenges in scaling our backend system to meet the demand until we found TiDB, a MySQL-compatible NewSQL hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) database, built and supported by PingCAP. Now we can provide better service and experience for our users without worrying about our database capacity.

In this post, Kevin Xu shares the PingCAP team's experience and activities at FOSDEM 2019, including three talks they delivered at the conference -- the first one about TiDB and its architecture, horizontal scalability and MySQL compatibility, the second about improving development posture in Rust based on the work building TiKV, and the last about Rust implementation of Prometheus.

TiDB-DM is an integrated data transfer and replication management platform that supports full data migration or incremental data replication from MySQL or MariaDB instances into a TiDB cluster. This post introduces its architecture design and implementation principles.

Lightning is an open source TiDB ecosystem tool that supports high speed full-import of a large SQL dump into a TiDB cluster. This post introduces its architecture and future improvements on the roadmap.

TiDB-Binlog is a tool used to collect the logical changes made to a TiDB cluster and provide incremental backup and replication. This post introduces its architecture evolution and implementation principles.

This post introduces the key new features of TiDB 3.0 Beta.

Thank you for a great 2018!

This post introduces the top five key differences between TiDB and MySQL.

As our business grew quickly, we were overwhelmed trying to tackle the mounting data until we found TiDB, a MySQL-compatible NewSQL hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) database, built and supported by PingCAP. Now we can harness our data with more confidence than ever before and provide better services for our users to enjoy a better life.

PingCAP, a leading distributed database company that created the popular MySQL-compatible cloud-native NewSQL database TiDB, announces that TiDB 2.1 is ready for General Availability.

This post discusses Raft Log Read, `ReadIndex` Read, and Lease Read, and why TiKV adopts the Lease Read approach.

This post provides a macro-level overview of TiDB and is the main reference content for readers to orient and dig deeper into other TiDB subjects.

This post announces that TiDB Cloud is now available for public preview.

As our business grew exponentially, we were overwhelmed trying to handle the mounting data until we found TiDB, a MySQL-compatible NewSQL hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) database, built and supported by PingCAP. Now we no longer worry about data volume and can bring high-quality entertainment services to our users with more confidence than before.

Today, we are excited to launch TiDB Academy, a series of technical training courses and certifications on TiDB and distributed databases in general, taught by our senior technical team.

PingCAP, a leading distributed database company that created the popular cloud-native NewSQL database TiDB, announces a $50 million Series C funding round led by FOSUN and Morningside Venture Capital. All previous investors—China Growth Capital, Yunqi Partners, Matrix Partners China, and others—have also participated in this round. PingCAP plans to use this new capital to expand the TiDB ecosystem globally, build cross-cloud product offering, and invest in innovation of its core technology.

TiDB recently added its 200th contributor. As CEO and co-founder of PingCAP who began building TiDB three years ago, I would like to thank the entire TiDB community for helping us reach this important milestone!

Since PingCAP started building TiDB, it has encountered countless challenges, pitfalls, and critical design choices. Over the past three years, the PingCAP team has answered many questions from the users. Ed Huang, the CTO of PingCAP, has summarized these questions into “9 why’s” that every engineer may ask when looking at a distributed database and gives his answers to these questions in this post to help make decision-making of engineers a bit easier.

With our fast-growing business, the surging data volume posed a serious challenge to our backend system and put the operations team under great pressure. How to tackle these challenges became a thorny problem until we found TiDB, a MySQL compatible distributed hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) database, built and supported by PingCAP. Finally, we do not have to worry about scaling databases and can focus on building better applications for our users.

This guide is intended to show how you can land your first Pull Request (PR) in Rust to contribute to TiKV in less than 30 minutes. But before we do that, here’s some helpful background.

The motivation behind building TiSpark was to enable real-time analytics on TiDB without the delay and challenges of ETL. Extract, transform, and load (ETL)--a process to extract data from operational databases, transform that data, then load it into a database designed to supporting analytics--has been one of the most complex, tedious, error-prone, and therefore disliked tasks for many data engineers. However, it was a necessary evil to make data useful, because there hasn’t been good solutions on the market to render ETL obsolete--until now.

In this 5-minute tutorial for beginners, we will show you how to spin up a standard TiDB cluster using Docker Compose on your local computer, so you can get a taste of its hybrid power, before using it for work or your own project in production.

As an open-source distributed scalable HTAP database, TiDB uses the Raft Consensus Algorithm in its distributed transactional key-value storage engine, TiKV, to ensure data consistency, auto-failover, and fault tolerance. TiDB has thus far been used by more than 200 companies in their production environments in a wide range of industries, from e-commerce and food delivery, to fintech, media, gaming, and travel.

TiDB 2.0 is released! We absorbed insights and feedbacks from our customers, listened to requests and issues from our community, and reflected internally on our ultimate vision of building a distributed hybrid transactional and analytical processing database that scales itself, heals itself, and lives in the cloud.

As an open source distributed NewSQL Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database, TiDB contains the most important asset of our customers--their data. One of the fundamental and foremost requirements of our system is to be fault-tolerant. But how do you ensure fault tolerance in a distributed database? This article covers the top fault injection tools and techniques in Chaos Engineering, as well as how to execute Chaos practices in TiDB.

Mobike has been using the TiDB database in the production environment since early 2017. Now they have deployed TiDB in multiple clusters with close to 100 nodes, handling dozens of TBs of data for different application scenarios. This post will provide a deep dive on why Mobike chose TiDB over MySQL and its sharding solutions by illustrating how TiDB solves their pain points.

Doing performance tuning on distributed systems is no joking matter. It’s much more complicated than on a single node server, and bottlenecks can pop up anywhere, from system resources in a single node or subcomponent, to cooperation between nodes, to even network bandwidth. Performance tuning is a practice that aims to find these bottlenecks and address them, in order to reveal more bottlenecks and address them as well, until the system reaches an optimal performance level. In this article, I will share some best practices on how to tune "write" operations in TiDB to achieve maximum performance.

At the crack of dawn on February 1, I landed in Brussels, Belgium, for the first time in my life. The goal of my trip wasn’t to taste the local cuisine, tour world-famous museums, or grab a pint of the local brew. It was to deliver a talk three days later at FOSDEM 2018 Rust Devroom about our experience at PingCAP using Rust to build TiKV, a distributed transactional Key-Value storage engine.

On January 20th, 2018, more than 200 coders, hackers, and techies streamed into Garage Café, a chic coffee shop in the heart of Beijing’s techhub, Zhongguancun. They were there to be part of TiDB DevCon 2018, a technology party for the developers, by the developers!

Thank you all, our beloved contributors, customers, and partners, for an amazing 2017! Hello, 2018!

At re:Invent 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Time Sync Service which is a highly accurate and reliable time reference that is natively accessible from Amazon EC2 instances. It is much like the Google TrueTime which was published in 2012. Why do Google and AWS both want to make efforts to provide global time service? Is there any inspiration for building distributed database? This topic is important to think about.

PingCAP, a cutting-edge distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database company, is excited to announce the opening of its Silicon Valley office, located at the GSV Labs in Redwood City, California.

Paxos or Raft is frequently used to ensure data consistency in the distributed computing area. But Paxos is known for its complexity and is rather difficult to understand while Raft is very simple. Therefore, a lot of emerging databases tend to use Raft as the consensus algorithm at its bottom layer. TiKV is no exception.

TiDB is compatible with MySQL, strong consistent and highly available.

This is the speech Li SHEN gave at the 3rd NEXTCON.

Every developer has his/her favorite programming language. For the TiKV team members, it's Rust.

This is the speech Siddon Tang gave at the RocksDB meetup on August 28, 2017.

This is the speech Siddon Tang gave at Bay Area Rust Meetup August 2017.

Data was corrupted. A cluster panicked. The crime scene was compromised. What happened? Detective Huang went all lengths to locate the criminal and solved it once and for all.

What happens when TiDB meets Jepsen?

The goal of TiKV is to support 100 TB+ data and it is impossible for one Raft group to make it, we need to use multiple Raft groups, which is called Multi-raft.

This document is a case study that details the reasons why yuanfudao.com chose TiDB as its backend database solution to tackle their fast data growth and complex queries.

TiKV uses the Raft algorithm to implement the strong consistency of data in a distributed environment. This blog introduces the details how Raft is implemented.

This article summarizes some best practices in using TiDB, mainly including SQL usage, OLAP/OLTP optimization techniques and especially TiDB's exclusive optimization switches.

This is the third one of three blogs to introduce TiDB internal.

This is the second one of three blogs to introduce TiDB internal.

This is the first one of three blogs to introduce TiDB internal.

In order to accelerate expression evaluation, we recently refactored its framework. This tutorial will show you how to use the new computational framework to rewrite or add a built-in function in TiDB.

This is the speech Siddon Tang gave at the 1st Rust Meetup in Beijing on April 16, 2017.

This is the speech Edward Huang gave at Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017.

This document is a use case that details the performance of MySQL and TiDB with tens of millions of rows of data per day.

The target audience of this document is the contributors in the TiDB community. The document aims to help them understand the TiDB project. It covers the system architecture, the code structure, and the execution process.

TiDB code is updated and the procedure of adding built-in functions is greatly simplified. This document describes how to add built-in functions to TiDB.

Subquery optimization, especially rewriting the correlated subquery, is a very difficult part in SQL query optimization. To be compatible with MySQL, TiDB enables users to write subqueries anywhere they want. For those subqueries that are not correlated, which are also called uncorrelated subqueries, TiDB evaluates in advance; for those correlated subqueries, TiDB removes the correlations as much as possible. For example, TiDB can rewrite a correlated subquery to `SemiJoin`. This article is focused on introducing the correlated subquery optimization methods in TiDB.

This document gives an overview of MVCC implementation in TiKV.

This document introduces the History Read feature in TiDB.

This document introduces how TiKV works as a Key-Value database.

This is the speech Max Liu gave at Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2016.