PingCAP TiDB Database

PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. Founded by Liu Qi, Dong Yitao, and Edward Huang in 2015, PingCAP has raised over 500 million dollars in funding and serves thousands of enterprises globally. TiDB has over 37,000 stars as of 2026. Key features include: MySQL compatibility (TiDB is wire-compatible with MySQL 5.7 protocol, enabling seamless migration of existing MySQL applications without code changes), horizontal scalability (auto-sharding and distributed execution across multiple nodes, scaling to petabytes of data and thousands of nodes without manual sharding), high availability (Raft consensus-based multi-region replication ensuring automatic failover and zero-data-loss guarantees), HTAP (TiKV for OLTP row-based storage and TiFlash for OLAP columnar storage, with real-time synchronization enabling transactional and analytical queries on the same database), distributed transactions (ACID-compliant distributed transactions using Percolator model with optimistic and pessimistic isolation levels), online DDL (schema changes executed online without locking tables or impacting running workloads), SQL plan management (SQL binding and plan baselines for query plan stability across versions), TiDB Cloud (fully managed TiDB service on AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud), multi-region deployment (cross-datacenter and cross-cloud-region replication for global data distribution and disaster recovery), TiDB Operator (Kubernetes-native operator for deploying and managing TiDB clusters), TiDB Data Migration (DM for real-time data migration from MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora to TiDB), TiCDC (Change Data Capture for streaming TiDB data to Kafka, S3, and other downstream systems), and TiFlash (columnar storage engine for real-time analytics without ETL pipelines).