TiDB Cloud

My main use case for TiDB Cloud  is to explore and learn about the product, since it is an open-source database. I wanted to understand how it works so I could illustrate and communicate about it effectively.

The primary goal has been learning about TiDB Cloud  so I could speak knowledgeably about it.

In my opinion, the best features that TiDB Cloud offers are horizontal scaling, high availability for platforms, and its open-source nature, which looks familiar to engineers since it resembles MySQL .

Horizontal scaling is valuable to me because databases that scale vertically hit a limit, and something that can automatically deploy another node to horizontally scale and do it automatically is of immense value to anyone running a SQL-based database. Regarding the open-source aspect, the biggest benefit is that there is no vendor lock-in, so I can use it for different services and integrate it with various products and solutions without being locked into AWS  and subject to their terms and conditions. This allows me to create my own value and my own path.

TiDB Cloud has impacted my organization positively by being a good partner. I have met many talented people there, and it was an introduction to the space for me.

I think TiDB Cloud could be improved from a marketing perspective, as it competes with PostgreSQL  in the space, where many people know or use PostgreSQL . The question is how they position themselves to be in the same aspect as PostgreSQL, because I feel that is one of their biggest barriers.

From a technical perspective, the main improvement I see is not necessarily being designed with the implication of being compatible with PostgreSQL, but I see an opportunity where they could create something that can re-architecture without being related to PostgreSQL. I also think it should be able to do all of that without downtime, but I have heard that is not currently the case.

I have been using TiDB Cloud for about six months.

TiDB Cloud is stable.

TiDB Cloud's scalability is the best in the business.

I do not really need customer support because I am only using it in a private capacity.

I would advise others looking into using TiDB Cloud to conduct a deep dive on a white paper and learn all the intricacies of your database. It makes sense to take a meeting to learn about it specifically for your environment, or do what I do and experiment with it in a test environment and then advance into a very informed meeting.

The biggest thing about using TiDB Cloud depends on the context. I am discussing using it in a smaller instance, but if I consider some of the results they produced for databreaks or last scene, those are the significant opportunities down the line. I think those are the things I would highlight and show to illustrate what someone would look for.

Since TiDB Cloud is open source and we are using the open-source free version, we have not adopted anything from a paid perspective, and I do not have that need for it yet.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

I use TiDB Cloud  for my PAT environment to test some features in TiDB.

I have used TiDB Cloud  to test TiFlash and TiKV performance and compare that with PostgreSQL , which I am currently working with.

I explored features such as analytical query performance with TiDB Cloud, where I examined the options in distributed systems and how a distributed database can help with data processing and other tasks.

According to my experience, TiDB Cloud is very easy to use because we don't need to maintain much in TiDB. All the activities are mostly automated there, and we can easily monitor the performance. We don't need to manually check the health checks and other statistics.

The automation in TiDB Cloud helps my daily workflow as it can generate automatic charts according to our workloads, and we can analyze the queries easily using this monitoring feature. Unlike traditional databases, we don't need to monitor the performance and other statistics manually. Instead, in TiDB Cloud we can use the features it comes with.

I think TiDB Cloud is very useful for beginners because of one feature I have noticed: Text to SQL. This feature means we don't need to write exact queries.

The distributed database options in TiDB Cloud have helped me because we can place the data in multiple data centers and multiple nodes. Due to this, when we are accessing some data, it won't affect all the nodes. It will only focus on the node where the data is present, and other users can still use the other data centers to fetch the data effectively.

From my point of view, TiDB Cloud requires more nodes to run the environment because for a self-hosted environment it needs to deploy three PD, three TiKV, and two TiFlash minimum. I think this is more costly than our traditional databases such as MySQL , MongoDB, or PostgreSQL .

We can improve the performance of TiDB Cloud for customers by reducing the cost and enhancing features such as processing large data by using minimal resources.

The main concern for my score of eight out of ten is about the cost. Additionally, due to its cluster and distributed architecture, it is not beginner-friendly for freshers and starting customers.

As I already mentioned, the cost is the main concern in TiDB Cloud, and also its architecture needs to be made more user-friendly for beginners.

I have been working with TiDB Cloud for more than one year.

The most important advice I will give to others looking into using TiDB Cloud is that cluster-level knowledge such as distributed systems is necessary. We need to understand the architecture and the flow of data and other details about the cloud. Additionally, we need to know about analytical and transactional workloads, which is the most important thing about TiDB Cloud database because it is designed for that. My review rating for TiDB Cloud is eight out of ten.

My main use case for TiDB Cloud  is like any relational database, where we collect data. There is one project that was rewritten internally, and the whole new flow was built on TiDB, starting from the internal chat to working with record locking. In this system, there are real estate properties that we launch into a process called annotation, where real people reconcile them. There is a target estate and another listing that we found on some platform, and an annotator has to mark it. There is locking based on who opened and got this job, because after that some bonuses to the salary will be accrued and salaries will be recalculated. The entire full cycle is stored in TiDB.

Mostly in our small legacy SaaS solution we still use MongoDB, but I am an advocate of migrating everything possible to TiDB. The latest thing I did was implementing page views on TiDB using a batch that hangs in a cron job and runs via a queue written on Kafka.

My expertise is in widgets, which are small micro frontends to provide our services to clients on their site. These include a lead-magnet widget, a map widget, and an FSBO widget, which is an assistant-manager assistant and a tool for contacting the owner of the property to provide an expert evaluation and offer to become their agent.

To be honest, I have not noticed a big difference with TiDB Cloud  compared to PostgreSQL , but the architecture and scalability itself are much more convenient. Nowadays deployment and autosizing for needs and loads are much more convenient. However, for large volumes of data, you have to make archive tables and move annotation records there once a month, for example.

I am not a DevOps expert; DevOps is more involved in the setup. I am more of a client who uses TiDB Cloud as a black box. As far as I know and understand, it can do automatic partitioning of data, which helps a lot for some filters. It can also scale to pods. I did not dig deeply into how exactly we have it deployed and how it is configured, but I know about its capabilities.

I do not really know about any other features of TiDB Cloud because I do not use anything else from relational databases right now. What was new and fresh for me is that I liked working with the JSON column type and with built-in functions; it is very convenient. It used to be much more problematic.

Speaking of the features I use as a developer, I find searching for elements in JSON objects particularly convenient in TiDB Cloud. That is what is really convenient. Everything else is in automatic mode.

It is very unusual and jarring that the IDs in different tables jump and do not start from zero.

I have been using TiDB Cloud for the last four years.

I have experienced full 100% stability with TiDB Cloud. However, sometimes there were issues precisely before we implemented archiving of large data. Then occasionally there were slowdowns. Archiving now runs once a month, and everything works more or less stably.

There are only critical situations when asynchronous tasks for data synchronization are launched because many different independent teams work, and sometimes they can create an unpredictably large load.

TiDB Cloud is deployed in our organization in a public cloud, not locally. I did not check if there is a TiDB image in Docker , but I am almost sure there should be one. We use it on dev environments and in production in Kubernetes . As for more specifics, I cannot say anything; I do not know about access and how it is deployed. It is hosted inside Kubernetes .

I would rate the quality of TiDB Cloud's customer support as unknown because I have not contacted them, and those questions are more for DevOps.

We used MongoDB, MariaDB , PostgreSQL , and a long time ago MySQL . We also used Oracle on one of the products. There were probably the most questions with Oracle because support is very complex and everything is very dependent on versions. Now, as far as I know, TiDB is constantly updated and maintained, and basically there have been no problems. It looks seamless and is a one-button click.

Compared to MongoDB, there is basically no choice; you have to move away from MongoDB because the runtime behavior of the code in production and in development is very unexpected. The data volumes are huge, with collections of 12 million records and so on. Because you work with them in an unstructured way, their volume and the objects themselves changed, their type changed, and maintaining old records becomes impossible. This now causes a problem when moving to a relational database. If we had been on one from the beginning, there would be fewer problems. The main complaint about MongoDB is that it deserializes objects if it does not find the required indexes and just starts killing the server by memory.

The general point is increased fault tolerance of the system.

There is a separate department in the company that handles pricing, implementation cost, and licensing for TiDB Cloud. A regular developer does not deal with it, and the decision was not made by me. TiDB was approved as an internal standard before I joined the company.

I am satisfied with this aspect, as far as I know and use it.

I do not know how TiDB is with vector tables, but I know they are somewhat in vogue right now thanks to the AI boom. However, the boom seems to be gradually fading, and vector tables may not be needed.

I do not know the competitors or who is a competitor to TiDB Cloud, because all other databases are hard to host yourself. I do not have specific advice for specialists who are considering using TiDB Cloud.

The reason I choose a rating of nine is that there is always room to grow; you cannot overpraise. This is quite a high score in my opinion because I have not encountered any task that could not be solved in TiDB. Unfortunately, I do not have experience comparing it with competitors, but as far as I know, there are no impossible tasks.

As far as I know, our TiDB integrates automatically only with Big Data or BigCloud, though I do not remember exactly what the tool is called that business analysts work in. All these tasks, as far as I remember, are integrated manually. It would probably be beneficial to have a UI where the entire data synchronization process can be automated.

I rate this product a nine out of ten.

As a native TiDB user, I install TiDB on EC2  machines, but I wanted to see how TiDB Cloud  helps in seamless integration with that ecosystem, so I conducted an experiment with TiDB with Vector and other features.

I have a use case where I wanted to try Vector Search, so I thought of using TiDB Cloud , and I conducted experiments and figured out the use cases for that.

The best features TiDB Cloud offers are mainly because of the easy scale-up of compute and data nodes. On an on-premises cluster that I manage, I would have to procure a new machine and add that to TiKV, but instead, I can easily manage the TiDB nodes, which is the main advantage that I see with it.

In an existing cluster that I manage on-premises, I have to get a new machine, do patching, and make the user SSH, but with TiDB Cloud, I can simply click and scale independently, which is the main advantage that I see with it.

The main advantage that I see with TiDB Cloud is the easy scale-up and scale-in without the need to buy any machines or do patching. It is less hassle; it used to take at least a couple of hours to bring in a new node, patching, and all those other tasks, but with TiDB Cloud, it takes very few minutes, probably a couple of minutes to bring up a new node.

Definitely, the employee and the team will be saved because they do not need a DBA to exclusively set the servers, patching, and all those other tasks, but for money saved, I am not sure about this point since I have not had a real adoption of that.

I think my use case has a direct migration DM tool, which brings the data from MySQL  to TiDB layer, and I am not sure if that is available on TiDB Cloud, so that is one thing I might not be aware of, or else that feature may not be present in TiDB Cloud.

One thing I want for TiDB Cloud is the DM because I specifically pull the data from MySQL  and put it on TiDB, but with TiDB Cloud, I do not think that DM is available.

Having said that, the one feature that I am exclusively using is the direct migration from MySQL to TiDB, which is a continuous replication from MySQL to TiDB, and I think it lacks in TiDB Cloud.

If you do not have an option to have a replication from MySQL to TiDB, you can go ahead and simply use TiDB Cloud because it is far more efficient than maintaining TiDB on-premises, but if you have a DM kind of solution, which is not yet there in TiDB Cloud, you might have to stick around with native TiDB.

I have been using TiDB Cloud for six or seven months.

TiDB Cloud is stable in my experience.

Scalability is very positive for TiDB Cloud, as DBAs can easily add a node if they figure out the nodes are not sufficient to handle the traffic, so I can give scalability a rating of ten out of ten.

I have not interacted with customer support for TiDB Cloud yet, as I conducted some experiments and have not fully moved to production, hence I have not tested the customer support.

The initial setup with TiDB Cloud is straightforward; the manuals, documentation, and everything were much simpler and easier to execute, so I have not had a hard time doing that.

Performance-wise, I do not see a problem with TiDB Cloud because I already use TiDB on-premises, which is pretty much similar to TiDB Cloud, so I am not seeing much of a difference.

I am partners with PingCAP.

Since I found that the DM is not there, I have not gone beyond the pricing point.

I heard about the pricing because I conducted only an experiment; since I found that the DM is not there, I have not gone beyond the pricing point.

Everything is simpler to adapt in TiDB Cloud versus a normal TiDB, apart from that, I do not wish for anything else to be easier or more flexible. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.