TiDB is an open-source, cloud-native, MySQL-compatible distributed database that handles hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) workloads. It is a member of the “NewSQL” class of relational databases that are designed to be deployed at massive scale. For those of you wondering, the “Ti” stands for Titanium.
PingCAP started building TiDB just three and a half years ago, but already the product has gathered upwards of 15,000 GitHub stars, 200 contributors, 7200 commits, 2000 forks, and 300 production users. Recently TiDB also collected InfoWorld’s 2018 Bossie Award as one of the best open source software projects in the data storage and analytics space.
In this article, I’ll walk through the core features and architectural design of TiDB, cover the three main use cases for the database, and offer a preview of the forthcoming multicloud TiDB-as-a-service offering and TiDB Academy from PingCAP.
