TiDB
NewSQL relational distributed database
TiDB (/ˈtaɪdiːbiː/; "Ti" stands for Titanium) is an open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. Designed to be MySQL compatible, it is developed and supported primarily by PingCAP and licensed under Apache 2.0. It is also available as a paid product. TiDB drew its initial design inspiration from Google's Spanner and F1 papers.
01History
TiDB was started in 2015 by PingCAP, a company founded by three infrastructure engineers who had previously worked on distributed systems at Chinese internet companies. The first general availability release, TiDB 1.0, shipped in October 2017.
TiDB's storage layer, TiKV, was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project in 2018 and graduated in September 2020. The same year, PingCAP engineers published a description of the system's architecture at the VLDB conference.
In October 2025, PingCAP announced TiDB X, an architectural revision that uses cloud object storage as the primary persistence layer and separates compute from storage.
02Main features
Horizontal scalability
TiDB can expand both SQL processing and storage capacity by adding new nodes.
MySQL compatibility
TiDB acts like it is a MySQL 8.0 server to applications. A user can continue to use all of the existing MySQL client libraries. Because TiDB's SQL processing layer is built from scratch, it is not a MySQL fork.
Distributed transactions with strong consistency
TiDB internally shards a table into small range-based chunks that are referred to as "Regions". Each Region defaults to approximately 256 MB in size, and TiDB uses a two-phase commit internally to ensure that regions are maintained in a transactionally consistent way.
Cloud native
TiDB is designed to work in the cloud. The storage layer of TiDB, called TiKV, became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) member project in August 2018, as a Sandbox level project, and became an incubation-level hosted project in May 2019. TiKV graduated from CNCF in September 2020.
Real-time HTAP
TiDB can support both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads. TiDB has two storage engines: TiKV, a rowstore, and TiFlash, a columnstore.
High availability
TiDB uses the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure that data is available and replicated throughout storage in Raft groups. In the event of failure, a Raft group will automatically elect a new leader for the failed member, and self-heal the TiDB cluster.
Vector Search
TiDB has a vector data type and vector indexes. This allows TiDB to be used as Vector database in AI Retrieval-augmented generation applications.
03Release history
| Release | Release date | LTS | End of life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unsupported: 1.0 | 2017-10-16 | NA | Unknown |
| Unsupported: 2.0 | 2018-04-27 | NA | Unknown |
| Unsupported: 2.1 | 2018-11-30 | NA | Unknown |
| Unsupported: 3.0 | 2019-06-28 | NA | 2023-09-25 |
| Unsupported: 3.1 | 2020-04-16 | NA | Unknown |
| Unsupported: 4.0 | 2020-05-28 | NA | 2024-04-02 |
| Unsupported: 5.0 | 2021-04-07 | NA | 2024-04-07 |
| Unsupported: 5.1 | 2021-06-24 | NA | 2024-06-24 |
| Unsupported: 5.2 | 2021-08-27 | NA | 2024-08-27 |
| Unsupported: 5.3 | 2021-11-30 | NA | 2024-11-30 |
| Unsupported: 5.4 | 2022-02-15 | NA | 2026-02-15 |
| Unsupported: 6.0 | 2022-04-07 | No | 2022-06-13 |
| Unsupported: 6.1 | 2022-06-13 | Yes | 2026-06-13 |
| Unsupported: 6.2 | 2022-08-23 | No | 2022-09-30 |
| Unsupported: 6.3 | 2022-09-30 | No | 2022-11-17 |
| Unsupported: 6.4 | 2022-11-17 | No | 2022-12-29 |
| Supported: 6.5 | 2022-12-29 | Yes | 2026-12-29 |
| Unsupported: 6.6 | 2023-02-20 | No | 2023-03-30 |
| Unsupported: 7.0 | 2023-03-30 | No | 2023-05-31 |
| Supported: 7.1 | 2023-05-31 | Yes | 2027-05-31 |
| Unsupported: 7.2 | 2023-06-29 | No | 2023-08-14 |
| Unsupported: 7.3 | 2023-08-14 | No | 2023-10-12 |
| Unsupported: 7.4 | 2023-10-12 | No | 2023-12-01 |
| Supported: 7.5 | 2023-12-01 | Yes | 2027-12-01 |
| Unsupported: 7.6 | 2024-01-25 | No | 2024-03-29 |
| Unsupported: 8.0 | 2024-03-29 | No | 2024-05-24 |
| Supported: 8.1 | 2024-05-24 | Yes | 2028-05-24 |
| Unsupported: 8.2 | 2024-07-11 | No | 2024-08-22 |
| Unsupported: 8.3 | 2024-08-22 | No | 2024-11-11 |
| Unsupported: 8.4 | 2024-11-11 | No | 2024-12-19 |
| Latest version: 8.5 | 2024-12-19 | Yes | 2030-12-19 for Enterprise Edition, 2028-12-19 for Community Edition |
04Deployment methods
Kubernetes with Operator
TiDB can be deployed in a Kubernetes-enabled cloud environment by using TiDB Operator. An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. It is designed for running stateful workloads and was first introduced by CoreOS in 2016. TiDB Operator was originally developed by PingCAP and open-sourced in August, 2018. TiDB Operator can be used to deploy TiDB on a laptop, Google Cloud Platform’s Google Kubernetes Engine, and Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.
TiUP
TiDB 4.0 introduces TiUP, a cluster operation and maintenance tool. It helps users quickly install and configure a TiDB cluster with a few commands.
TiDB Cloud
TiDB Cloud is a relational database offered as a service provided by PingCAP.
05Tools
TiDB has a series of open-source tools built around it to help with data replication and migration for existing MySQL and MariaDB users.
TiDB Data Migration (DM)
TiDB Data Migration (DM) is suited for replicating data from already sharded MySQL or MariaDB tables to TiDB. A common use case of DM is to connect MySQL or MariaDB tables to TiDB, treating TiDB almost as a slave, then directly run analytical workloads on this TiDB cluster in near real-time.
Backup & Restore
Backup & Restore (BR) is a distributed backup and restore tool for TiDB cluster data.
Dumpling
Dumpling is a data export tool that exports data stored in TiDB or MySQL. It lets users make logical full backups or full dumps from TiDB or MySQL.
TiDB Lightning
TiDB Lightning is a tool that supports high speed full-import of a large MySQL dump into a new TiDB cluster. This tool is used to populate an initially empty TiDB cluster with much data, in order to speed up testing or production migration. The import speed improvement is achieved by parsing SQL statements into key-value pairs, then directly generate Sorted String Table (SST) files to RocksDB.
TiCDC
TiCDC is a change data capture tool which streams data from TiDB to other systems like Apache Kafka.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “TiDB”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- TiDB-Symbol-Red-RGB.svg by Unknown author, Fair use
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.