Engineering

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 […]

From the outset, Prometheus has served as a go-to tool for real-time performance metric collection, storage, querying, and observability in TiDB. Additionally, TiDB supports offline diagnostics using TiDB Clinic, which allows for replaying collected metrics to investigate historical issues. Figure 1. How TiDB Clinic provides offline diagnostics. However, as deployments scaled, so did the challenges […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]