Author: Mike Barlow (Solution Architect at PingCAP)

Editors: Tina Yang, Tom Dewan, Caitin Chen

Overview

This two-part blog series will show you how to get a simple TiDB cluster up and running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The goal is to let you quickly set up TiDB and learn about its benefits. The entire process should take you about 30 minutes. In this first part, we’ll prepare the GCP environment. In the second part, we’ll set up and run TiDB on GCP.

By the end of this series your architecture will look similar to the following:

Google Cloud results

• Accelerates product launch process around the world with widely distributed cloud infrastructure and cross-region networks
• Reduces time to market from one year to three months with flexible cloud tools
• Cuts 25% of operational costs by timely adjusting resources used according to needs with GKE
• Supports highly automated and scalable database as a service while ensuring data security and compliance with local regulations

Database software is an indispensable part of a company’s daily operations. It is used not only for storing and compiling records, but also running websites and applications. As enterprises around the world increasingly go digital…

Author: Zhenchi Zhong (Software Engineer at PingCAP)

Transcreator: Caitin Chen; Editor: Tom Dewan

TiKV is a distributed key-value database. It has higher performance requirements than a regular application, so tracing tools must have minimal impact. This article describes how we achieved tracing all requests’ time consumption in TiKV with less than 5% performance impact.

Background knowledge

Logs, metrics, and traces are the three pillars of system observability. The following figure shows their relationship:

Author: Jia Lin (Leader of Real-time Application team at the NetEase Gaming Billing Data Center, Contributor of Apache Flink)

Transcreator: Ran Huang; Editor: Tom Dewan

TiDB is a distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Apache Flink is the most popular, open source computing framework. It provides high-throughput, low-latency data computing and exactly-once semantics.

At NetEase, these two powerful softwares provide reliable, convenient support for our real-time gaming applications. In this article, I’ll share our pain points when using…

Author: Tianyi Wang (Database architect at PingCAP)

Transcreator: Ran Huang; Editor: Tom Dewan

Companies with a lot of data rely on data warehouses for data processing and analytics. To achieve business agility, offline data warehouses are no longer sufficient, and real-time data warehouses are gradually taking over. Currently, real-time data warehouses often use Apache Flink to consume data from Apache Kafka and stream data into a database. However, because Kafka doesn’t persist data in disks, in extreme cases, data is lost.

After researching the databases and storage systems on the market, we found a more efficient and accurate real-time data…

Author: Zhenchi Zhong (Software Engineer Intern at PingCAP)

Transcreator: Charlotte Liu; Editor: Tom Dewan

TiKV is a distributed key-value storage engine, which is based on the designs of Google Spanner, F1, and HBase. However, TiKV is much simpler to manage because it does not depend on a distributed file system.

As introduced in A Deep Dive into TiKV and How TiKV Reads and Writes, TiKV applies a 2-phase commit (2PC) algorithm inspired by Google Percolator to support distributed transactions. These two phases are Prewrite and Commit.

In this article, I’ll explore the execution workflow of a TiKV request in the…

Authors:

• Chang Yu (Engineer at Qihoo 360)
• Xiang Wang (Committer of Chaos Mesh, Engineer at PingCAP)

Transcreator: Ran Huang; Editor: Tom Dewan

Chaos Mesh® is a cloud-native Chaos Engineering platform that orchestrates chaos in Kubernetes environments. With Chaos Mesh, you can test your system’s resilience and robustness on Kubernetes by injecting all types of faults into Pods, network, file system, and even the kernel.

Since it was open-sourced and accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a sandbox project, Chaos Mesh has attracted contributors worldwide and helped users test their systems. …

Industry: Banking

Author: China Zheshang Bank

Transcreator: Caitin Chen; Editor: Tom Dewan

China Zheshang Bank is a national joint-stock commercial bank based in China. We aim to provide customers with open, efficient, flexible, and shared comprehensive financial services. By the end of June 2020, we had established 260 branches throughout the country. In terms of total assets, we ranked 97th on the “Top 1000 World Banks 2020” list by the British magazine The Banker.

As our businesses grew, our data size boomed. Our databases couldn’t meet our requirements for data storage and analytics. After comparing multiple distributed databases, we adopted…