Engineering

Dropping a table by mistake is one of those worst-case scenarios every database operator dreads. Maybe you thought the table wasn’t in use anymore. Maybe you were connected to the wrong environment. Either way, the moment you realize what happened, the clock starts ticking. With traditional databases like MySQL, recovering a dropped table means restoring […]

Adding an index has always been a sensitive operation: The challenge is clear: How do we build indexes that are fast, stable, and minimally disruptive, even at massive scale? TiDB X, the latest version of TiDB that introduces dedicated object storage, addresses this problem through a combination of three major innovations: In this blog, we explain why […]

If you’ve worked with relational databases long enough, you’ve almost certainly encountered stored procedures. They made sense in an era when network latency was expensive and applications were monolithic, but the world has moved on. In this post, we’ll look at why stored procedures are holding teams back and what a modern alternative looks like. […]

What Is Multi-Writer Change Data Capture (CDC)? Change Data Capture (CDC) is a pattern for tracking and propagating data changes in real time, powering use cases like downstream synchronization, auditing, event streaming, and real-time analytics. In a single-writer CDC system (e.g., MySQL binlog, PostgreSQL WAL replication), one node handles all writes, producing a single sequential […]

Distributed database backups are not just about coordinating the copying of files from multiple machines. It is capturing a single, consistent point in time across a system that is actively processing transactions. In TiDB, data is distributed across many nodes. Transactions use MVCC with a two-phase commit protocol. Transactions may touch multiple partitions at once. […]

AI coding agents are excellent at producing code that “works on my machine”. But as every database engineer knows, there is a massive gap between a query that runs in a local Docker container and one that survives in a high-concurrency production environment. We keep seeing the same issues arise when agents generate SQL based […]

When AI workloads first started hitting production systems, many teams assumed the pressure would fall on compute. More GPUs, faster CPUs, larger memory pools — that felt like the obvious scaling path. But that’s not what broke first. Systems didn’t fail because they ran out of compute. They failed because they ran out of storage […]

Online Data Definition Language (DDL) is a crucial feature for modern databases and a cornerstone of MySQL modernization strategies. It allows schema changes without significant downtime or locking that could disrupt database operations. This means these operations carry out while the database continues to be available for reads and writes, minimizing downtime and avoiding disruption […]

TiDB is an open-source distributed SQL database built for cloud-native, data-intensive, and AI-driven applications. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability. By leveraging a TiCDC replication solution for Open Mirroring, TiDB seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Fabric. This unlocks continuous, real-time data synchronization from any TiDB deployment environment into Microsoft […]

Modern applications generate enormous amounts of event data with user actions, transactions, logs, and metrics all happening in real time. To handle this scale, many teams rely on Apache Kafka, a distributed messaging system that decouples applications from their data pipelines and ensures reliable, high-throughput data delivery. On the storage side, TiDB provides a distributed SQL database that […]

Schema changes at scale can be a nightmare for SaaS applications. Slow index creation, long-running schema modifications, and scalability limits can disrupt operations, making real-time database evolution nearly impossible. TiDB has been tackling these challenges head-on, continuously pushing the boundaries of distributed SQL and DDL execution. Last year, we boosted index creation speed by 10x, enabling […]

Have you ever seen two nearly identical SQL statements, differing only in date parameters or function variations, return similar results but with wildly different performance, sometimes by factors of 10 or 100? In real-world scenarios, we typically run the `EXPLAIN` statement to examine changes in the execution plan. But what if the execution plan doesn’t […]