TiDB Cloud

In production, we use the cloud, but in other environments like development and integration, we use self-managed. We store quite a lot of data on TiDB Cloud  because it is a scalable database that supports tons of data with online and offline analysis, and online transactions.

Our company focuses on transportation support, with many sensors installed on cars and trucks that collect a lot of data about them. Truck owners can then use this data to analyze their cars and their business to support and grow their business.

I would like to share how we calculate the speed of the car and the value of the truck, as all the CRUD operations about the data happen in TiDB Cloud .

In my experience, the best feature TiDB Cloud offers is that whenever we want to scale up or scale out our database, it is very simple—just a simple click, and it will scale out automatically.

I appreciate the speed of the scaling feature because it is very fast, and the lack of downtime is also my favorite aspect.

There are cost savings because of TiDB Cloud.

I would like to share some specific details on the cost savings: first, we save a lot of money on hardware, second, we have fewer employees needed for maintenance, and third, we have less downtime which helps our business be much more successful. These are all advantages that TiDB Cloud provides.

I have not really noticed any areas where TiDB Cloud could be improved or faced any challenges.

I have not used TiDB Cloud at all, but I have been using TiDB, the self-managed cluster for about half a year.

I do not know much about the technical details of TiDB Cloud, so I cannot answer questions about how we process or analyze that sensor data, including if we run real-time queries or batch jobs.

The performance of TiDB Cloud is very good under heavy workloads and spikes in traffic; it handles the traffic very well, and we have never encountered any downtime because of peak traffic.

TiDB Cloud is a very good choice when you are handling a massive set of data and also want high performance, easy scaling, and high availability.

It is not easy for our team to adopt TiDB Cloud because it is quite complicated. Even though you have provided very detailed documentation, it still takes us a lot of time to work through the whole document to establish best practices on TiDB Cloud.

TiDB Cloud  is basically used for building scalable, high-availability databases that combine the strengths of OLTP. The main use cases would be for HTAP workloads, STAP workloads, distributed SQL systems, cloud-native databases, or large-scale databases. I have implemented it in making analytics dashboards and e-commerce platforms.

I use TiDB Cloud  for analytics dashboards because it supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing. You can query fresh transactional data in real-time without ETL delays. For data ingestion, applications write transaction data into TiDB Cloud. It supports the MySQL  protocol, which is easy for integration. It also replicates data to TiFlash for columnar storage with OLTP queries. It has query layers and is useful for visualization tools such as Grafana , which can connect to TiDB Cloud as a data source.

I have also been working on a financial payment system in my personal project. It uses high transactions, ACID consistency, and real-time fraud checks. TiDB Cloud provides strong consistency and high availability. For one of my e-commerce platforms, I used it for inventory tracking and user activity tracking for horizontal scaling. It handles sudden loads well.

TiDB Cloud offers horizontal scalability. You can scale TiDB Cloud simply by adding more nodes with no manual sharding. That is a significant advantage over traditional MySQL  setups. It also supports MySQL compatibility, as it supports the MySQL protocol and syntax. It has hybrid transactional and analytical processing for real-time analytics on data, so no separate data warehouse is needed. It supports ACID transactions and high availability.

Another feature of TiDB Cloud is the cloud-native design. It works smoothly with modern infrastructures such as elastic scaling, container-ready orchestration, and microservice architecture. It separates the SQL layer from the storage layer for independent scaling and a flexible architecture. It is an enterprise-grade design.

TiDB Cloud has positively impacted my organization, especially where massive scale and real-time analytics were needed. It powers core cloud services. We have used HTAP workloads, what we call STAP workloads, or the cloud-managed service. My job was to handle the cloud network for financial data.

TiDB Cloud performance can be improved by enabling and tuning TiFlash. For example, use TiFlash replicas for heavy analytic workloads. This will impact query speed for dashboards and aggregation speed. Proper cluster sizing is important, such as adding more TiKV nodes for high throughput. Optimizing SQL and index optimization, such as removing unused indexes, are other ways. Region and data distribution tuning can also help.

Monitoring with Grafana  for things such as QPS, latency, and regional hotspots helps catch bottlenecks early, as does monitoring CPU and I/O usage. Utilizing horizontal scaling is also beneficial.

I have been using TiDB Cloud for one to 1.5 years, and I have worked with multiple companies that use TiDB Cloud as their main database. I had quite a good experience with TiDB Cloud and how it works.

TiDB Cloud is considered stable and production-grade when deployed correctly. Most downtime issues come from misconfiguration and under-provisioning, not the core product. It has multi-replica storage using Raft. It separates the SQL layer, so there is no single point of failure. It also has automatic failover. We have seen very few issues. TiDB Cloud is used in FinTech and e-commerce. In terms of stability, it is much better.

Query speed and latency for OLTP is typically a few milliseconds, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of QPS. There is also horizontal scaling efficiency, with no manual sharding required and independence. It provides real-time analytics and data visibility for the organization. Large dataset handling is another benefit. It delivers a certain level of performance for large-scale applications.

I once contacted TiDB Cloud's customer support. Its reputation is considered strong, especially for enterprise and cloud users. My experience varied by support tier. There was 24/7 support available with quick response times and dedicated support engineers. The support was good and strong.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support for TiDB Cloud at about a six. It is a good number. You get a fast response with paid plans. This was not the case with the free plans, but the paid plans were much more responsive.

I basically worked with other solutions before using TiDB Cloud. We used MySQL, but after experiencing TiDB Cloud's automatic sharding, I did not go back to MySQL. TiDB Cloud was giving me the features and performance I needed most. I did not need to look for another one.

I worked with MySQL before choosing TiDB Cloud. It used vertical scaling, so it was a costly and not very cost-friendly solution compared to TiDB Cloud. It was a single node or master-slave setup. It was simple to start with MySQL, and it was a familiar ecosystem. After using TiDB Cloud, I did not switch to anything else because of its compatibility and ease of migration.

In my organization, we reported a strong ROI after adopting TiDB Cloud. The return depends on the workload, scale, and what problems you are replacing. It eliminated manual sharding costs. Before, the team had to maintain complex sharding logic, but after TiDB Cloud, it was a simple architecture with automatic sharding. Infrastructure costs were also reduced. MySQL was replaced with TiDB Cloud plus TiFlash, which leads to fewer ETL costs. It provides better scaling; we avoided vertical scaling, which was expensive. TiDB Cloud allows scaling only when needed.

The pricing for TiDB Cloud depends heavily on how you deploy it. Organizations usually evaluate costs based on scalability needs. The main pricing models are that TiDB Cloud itself is free, and you pay for infrastructure and storage. There was no license fee when we worked with the higher-tier plan. The pricing was almost similar to others, but it provides more functional features. TiDB Cloud is an add-on in terms of functionality. We did not focus much on the pricing, but it does provide more functions and features.

I would rate TiDB Cloud overall at an eight out of ten. It has pretty good horizontal scaling and OLTP use.

TiDB Cloud stands out because it combines traditional SQL reliability with modern distributed scaling. Most systems separate OLTP and OLAP, but TiDB Cloud runs both. It also has MySQL compatibility. There is no manual sharding. Other manual distributed databases sacrifice consistency, but TiDB Cloud provides full ACID, distributed transactions, and Raft replication. That makes it stand out from others.

TiDB Cloud is typically deployed in my organization as a distributed cluster to support high availability. In my company, there was a standard deployment architecture with a service layer behind a load balancer. The second layer was TiKV for distributed storage. TiFlash was optional, but we used it for fast OLAP queries. There were also placement drivers.

TiDB Cloud is a strong, modern distributed SQL database. Its real value appears only at scale, with balanced workloads or on a rapidly growing SaaS platform. It really shines there for high-concurrency and mixed workloads.

I would tell others looking into using TiDB Cloud that it supports horizontal sharding and node replicas. Use TiDB Cloud for write-heavy workloads, as it outshines others for things such as high-concurrency OLTP and high-throughput data. Benchmark real queries and validate the HTAP benefits. This prevents surprises in production. Plan for proper cluster sizing.

We worked mainly with Azure  for TiDB Cloud. My overall rating for this product is eight out of ten.

My main use case for TiDB Cloud is developing technical documentation related to vehicle services, such as buses and trucks for Iveco.

TiDB Cloud helps with that process as it is a Content Management System, which allows me to organize all the information in a chaptering structure. I start from the Bill of Materials of the vehicle and use drawings released by engineering to develop technical documentation for owner manuals, service manuals, and similar materials.

TiDB Cloud has positively impacted my organization by improving documentation management. It is better than the previous system where documents were developed using Word or Interleaf, as using TiDB Cloud allows us to have everything stored in a good archive that we can read and use for new projects.

The improved archive and accessibility help my team by saving time, mostly because we can find information more easily than before.

The best features TiDB Cloud offers are the possibility to easily reuse information in different documents, which really stands out to me.

The ability to reuse information across documents helps my team as it saves time and reduces errors because we do not have to rewrite the same information anymore.

TiDB Cloud has positively impacted my organization by improving documentation management. It is better than the previous system where documents were developed using Word or Interleaf, as using TiDB Cloud allows us to have everything stored in a good archive that we can read and use for new projects.

The improved archive and accessibility help my team by saving time, mostly because we can find information more easily than before.

TiDB Cloud can be improved, particularly because the interface is very old. I think it would be helpful to have a new interface.

I have been using TiDB Cloud for ten years.

TiDB Cloud is stable.

TiDB Cloud's scalability is good as it can handle growth easily.

Customer support for TiDB Cloud is quite good based on my experiences. I would rate the customer support a ten.

Before TiDB Cloud, the company decided to switch from a different solution.

I have not seen a return on investment from TiDB Cloud.

I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for TiDB Cloud because it is managed by the IT team.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing TiDB Cloud.