A history of Databases It is rare for any technology to exist for more than 50 years in a rapidly changing IT industry. Databases have a longevity that is an anomaly, as other technologies come and go with the times. If we look back at the history of databases, we can distinguish five stages: …

Author: Ed Huang (Co-Founder & CTO at PingCAP) This post is the second part in our series. You can find the first part here: Long Live MySQL: Good Old MySQL Should Be Rejuvenated. I am a firm believer in MySQL and its ecosystem. As I said in my previous article…

Author: Ed Huang (Co-Founder & CTO at PingCAP) This post is the first part in our series. You can see the second part here: Long Live MySQL: Kudos to the Ecosystem Innovators. Imagine you’re an application developer, and your manager tells you to prototype a new application in a week…

4.6 billion is literally an astronomical figure. The richest star map of our galaxy, brought by Gaia space observatory, includes just under 2 billion stars. What does a view of 4.6 billion GitHub events really look like? …

Elastic block store can better manage the distinction between compute and storage. — Written by Bokang Zhang (Infrastructure Engineer at PingCAP) and Chenhao Huang (Developer Relations Specialist at PingCAP). Nowadays, many Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions separate the computation layer and the storage layer. These include, for example, Amazon Aurora and Google BigQuery. This solution is attractive, as the data storage and data replication can…

Streaming, pipelining, and parallelization can be used to design applications to maximize the utilization of resources on a single node. Then, you can add additional hardware resources to scale your system out/up. — Written by Cong Liu, Infrastructure Engineer, and Pheobe He, Information Developer, both at PingCAP. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, once said, “Every company is now a software company.” Take the online food ordering business, for example. Digital ordering and delivery have grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014…

A data direction tool that exports both historical and real-time incremental data from TiDB into data lakes. — Data Lake is one of the most popular data storage technologies to emerge in recent years. Contrary to traditional data warehouses, a data lake can hold a vast amount of raw data in its native format until the data is needed for analytical applications. A data lake can also update…

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use dbt with TiDB. — Written by Wu Qiang (Platform Engineer at PingCAP) Data build tool (dbt) is a popular open-source data transformation tool that enables analytics engineers to transform data in their warehouses through SQL statements. The TiDB community recently released the dbt-tidb adapter to make TiDB, a distributed SQL database to work with…

Take you through the specific ways TiDB can solve your infrastructure issues. — Written by Li Shen (SVP at PingCAP) Does this sound like you? You’re a startup with an innovative product, fantastic goals, and a lot of drive. But as your business grows, your infrastructure issues grow, too. How do you scale your database? How do you ensure high availability and disaster…