Announcing the TiDB Incubator Program

Author: Mia Zhou (Community Operations Manager at PingCAP)

Transcreator: Calvin Weng; Caitin Chen

Today, we are excited to introduce the TiDB Incubator Program, a program designed to ensure that new projects in the TiDB ecosystem can obtain resources and help from the community towards their desired maturity level.

About the TiDB Incubator Program

The TiDB community is composed of developers, users, and partners in the TiDB ecosystem, and we’re dedicated to building “the database of the future” and the sustainable ecosystem for it. With the continued efforts, love, and support from the entire community, the TiDB ecosystem continues to evolve. More and more open source projects are now part of the great TiDB family, such as TiKV, the open-source distributed transaction Key-Value database, Weir, the service-oriented TiDB database management platform, and TiBigData, the bigdata component used to link TiDB and Apache Flink.

In the future, more projects will sprout, grow, mature, and even develop into independent projects in the TiDB community. To help these projects obtain more resources and help from the community, we started the TiDB Incubator Program.

What does the incubator program mean for your project?

Joining the incubating program means that your project is a “good fit” in the TiDB ecosystem with a range of validated scenarios, and that your project will be benefiting from the support and stewardship of the TiDB community.

During the incubation process, the TiDB community will provide technical and specification guidance. The process also ensures incubating projects have the correct licensing, up-to-date boilerplate documents, a healthy community process, and that they are developed in accordance with the TiDB Community Code of Conduct. Once an incubating project reaches a desired level of maturity, it becomes a Graduated project. The TiDB community will provide comprehensive marketing support to help them quickly gain the attention of the community and the public.

Some projects currently in incubation

TiBigData is an incubating project initiated by Zhihu. Its goal is to integrate TiDB and various technology stacks more easily in enterprise big data scenarios. Currently, the integration capability of TiDB with Flink and Presto has been completed, and it has been applied to Zhihu’s data integration platform and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analysis scenarios. “Zhihu may have initiated the TiBigData project, but it belongs to the entire TiDB community,” said Sun Xiaoguang, Chairman of the TiDB Community Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). “We hope it benefits users with similar needs in the community. We also hope to mobilize the power of the community to complement TiDB’s capabilities in various big data technology stacks and build TiBigData as a one-stop big data solution for TiDB.”

Weir is a distributed database-oriented middleware platform initiated by Palfish. It has completed MySQL protocol support, multi-tenant management, connection pooling, back-end load balancing, configuration hot loading, platform management, and other functions. Palfish has begun to promote internal business access. “Participating in the TiDB Incubator Program can quickly find like-minded friends, and efficiently share ideas and collaborate. This makes open source easier and more fun,” said Chen Xianlin, the TiDB Community TOC member and the head of Palfish Technology Center.

Joining the Incubator Program

If you want to incubate a new project under the umbrella of the TiDB ecosystem, follow the Projects Incubation Process to join the TiDB Incubator program. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us on the TiDB Community Slack Workspace #incubator channel.