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TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

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Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as before, excellent when you little little data and limited transactions. Once things get big and you lose sync, everything goes to shit.

They claimed they successfully onboarded a customer with 1 PB of data at KubeCon NA. I have strong doubts about distributed DBs in general, but I also can’t see them blatantly lying in a talk.

how do you have doubts when nearly every significant company is running one, and distributed DBs are consistently proven to be the most correct (e.g. FDB, TigerBeetle)?

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claimed they successfully onboarded a customer with 1 PB of data at KubeCon NA. I have strong doubts about distributed DBs in general, but I also can’t see them blatantly lying in a talk.

how do you have doubts when nearly every significant company is running one, and distributed DBs are consistently proven to be the most correct (e.g. FDB, TigerBeetle)?

Sorry, should have clarified: I have doubts about their necessity (as I stated in another comment).

Most tech companies have poor knowledge of proper data modeling and SQL, leading to poor schema design, and suboptimal queries. Combine that with the fact that networked storage (e.g. EBS) is the norm, and it’s no wonder that people think they need another solution.

The amount of QPS you can get out of a single DB is staggering when it’s correctly designed, and on fast hardware with local NVMe disks (or has a faster distributed storage solution). Consider that a modern NVMe drive can quite easily deliver 1,000,000+ IOPS.

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you have doubts when nearly every significant company is running one, and distributed DBs are consistently proven to be the most correct (e.g. FDB, TigerBeetle)?

Sorry, should have clarified: I have doubts about their necessity (as I stated in another comment). Most tech companies have poor knowledge of proper data modeling and SQL, leading to poor schema design, and suboptimal queries. Combine that with the fact that networked storage (e.g. EBS) is the norm, and it’s no wonder that people think they need another solution. The amount of QPS you can get out of a single DB is s…

distributed DBs provide seamless fault tolerance story usually.

> Consider that a modern NVMe drive can quite easily deliver 1,000,000+ IOPS.

There could be other bottlenecks, for example I am consistently experiencing that linux kernel doesn't handle memory pages allocations fast enough once disk traffic hits few GB/s, because it does it in single thread.

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#15
post #5

I love these new distributed DBs. CockroachDB is one of them. Still I think a managed Postgres/MySQL is a better choice. My primary concern is how challenging will it be if you have to eventually move your data out to a RDBMS for cost or other reasons. Does anyone have any experience ? I am not talking enterprise scale but data about size of 50 - 100GB scale.

I think it is mostly three folds. Availability, to be cloud agnostic and scale of few tbs to few hundred TBs. I have been seeing cockroach and yugabyte in an on prem setup where you don't get the benefits of a cloud provider but you can get the availability guarantees and fault tolerance.

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#17

VC backed database company with a CLA on their "open source" project. Red flag. Is there a community fork yet?

How would you fund the open source development of a database?

TiDB is Apache licensed, that should be enough no? Because if we ban all projects from VC-backed startups, you're going to clear your tech stack pretty quickly.

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claimed they successfully onboarded a customer with 1 PB of data at KubeCon NA. I have strong doubts about distributed DBs in general, but I also can’t see them blatantly lying in a talk.

how do you have doubts when nearly every significant company is running one, and distributed DBs are consistently proven to be the most correct (e.g. FDB, TigerBeetle)?

"every significant company"? i'd say most of them just use postgres or mysql and scale fine.

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#19
post #10

Hardly hear about TiDB. How is it faring and how does it stack up to more well know competition?

I hear through the grapevine they’ve got a bunch of companies using it. I think Airbnb migrated to it.

There are quite a few. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Plaid, Mercari, and Rakuten shared their experiences with TiDB at PingCAP's annual event last year (2024) - https://www.pingcap.com/htap-summit/.

In the previous event (2023) there were speakers from Airbnb, Databricks, Flipkart, PayPay, and others sharing their experiences as well - https://www.pingcap.com/htap-summit/sept-2023/

Disclosure: Employee of PingCAP the company behind TiDB

Re: TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go

#20
post #17

VC backed database company with a CLA on their "open source" project. Red flag. Is there a community fork yet?

How would you fund the open source development of a database? TiDB is Apache licensed, that should be enough no? Because if we ban all projects from VC-backed startups, you're going to clear your tech stack pretty quickly.

I think the concern is that the company would relicense future versions, as allowed by the CLA, under pressure from VCs.
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