Block: One Product Team’s Journey to Self-Host TiDB in Production

Overview

Square Message is the messaging hub that aims to unify buyer-seller communication across the Block’s ecosystem. As their data volume quickly grew, the original data stack couldn’t scale, query latency increased, and schema migrations were shaky. After researching alternatives, they chose TiDB database and thought it was an ergonomic alternative to sharded MySQL.

In this session, Software Engineer Henry Qin and his team discuss why they went with TiDB, their experience with it, and what they’ve learned.