Cloud database has supported massive sensor analytics and reduced costs but adoption needs guidance
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
I have not really noticed any areas where TiDB Cloud could be improved or faced any challenges.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have not used TiDB Cloud at all, but I have been using TiDB, the self-managed cluster for about half a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
Hybrid workloads have powered real-time analytics and simplified scaling for critical services
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Organized vehicle documentation has improved reuse of technical content across manuals
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
TiDB Cloud can be improved, particularly because the interface is very old. I think it would be helpful to have a new interface.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using TiDB Cloud for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
TiDB Cloud's scalability is good as it can handle growth easily.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for TiDB Cloud is quite good based on my experiences. I would rate the customer support a ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before TiDB Cloud, the company decided to switch from a different solution.
What was our ROI?
I have not seen a return on investment from TiDB Cloud.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for TiDB Cloud because it is managed by the IT team.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I did not evaluate other options before choosing TiDB Cloud.
Robust Performance for Real-Time Analytics with TiDB
What do you like best about the product?
I use TiDB as a database for my real-time stock analytics platform, and it resolves quite a few problems I faced with a single large instance of Postgres. TiDB performs well under heavy load while monitoring a large number of stocks. I love the MySQL compatibility, which made the migration from Postgres to TiDB easy without needing to learn a new framework. The HTAP feature eliminates the need for dedicated ETL pipelines for analytics, and the strong consistency is crucial for accurate financial transactions. I also appreciate the separation of compute versus storage, allowing me to scale them independently as needed. The initial setup for testing the migration was easy, making the transition smoother for my team.
What do you dislike about the product?
- The plan optimizer was sometimes unstable - The UI can be better - Learning curve of distributed architecture is challenging
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I find TiDB handles heavy loads, integrates HTAP to eliminate ETL pipelines, ensures strong consistency for financial data, and reduces costs. The MySQL compatibility eases migration, and separation of compute and storage allows independent scaling.
Seamless Scalability with TiDB's Powerful HTAP
What do you like best about the product?
I use TiDB as the primary database for my LLM testing project, AIBenchFlow, because it stores large volumes of data efficiently. TiDB is excellent for scalability, performance, and consistency, which is crucial as my project runs thousands of tests concurrently. The MySQL compatibility was a huge plus since it made integration fast without needing to learn a new tech stack. I really like the distributed architecture, which makes scalability seamless, allowing TiDB to scale horizontally without much of my attention. The HTAP feature is fantastic because it lets me run transactions and analytics on the same system, eliminating the need for a separate pipeline just for analytics. The initial setup with TiDB Cloud was easy, and during the testing phase of the migration from MySQL, we were able to replicate the setup within a day.
What do you dislike about the product?
One area I think could be improved is the learning curve around its distributed architecture. Though the docs are solid, it can feel overwhelming at first. More beginner friendly real-world examples would help newbies like me. The most overwhelming aspect was to understand how its components - SQL layer, storage layer etc.. work together in a distributed cluster. Better diagrams and videos could be help a beginner like me. Since, my project requires real time analytics and transactions, more concrete examples on the performance tuning would be helpful.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
TiDB solves scalability, performance, and consistency challenges. It scales well without degrading performance and ensures strong consistency for transactions. Its MySQL compatibility made integration seamless, reducing costs and maintenance as it handles HTAP workloads in a single system.
Seamless Integration, Reliable and Scalable
What do you like best about the product?
I really appreciate how flexible TiDB is. It allows our system to grow without needing big changes to the overall structure. Even as we add new features like more agents, more analytics, and more personalization, the database doesn't slow things down or become a limiting factor. Another thing that works really well is how TiDB stays out of the way. There's no need to constantly tweak settings or worry about scaling as usage changes. This kind of easy to maintain reliability is really useful when the main focus is on AI orchestration and user experience, not on managing the database itself. The initial setup was also smooth and simple to add to our current cloud system, which makes it fit well into the larger ecosystem without causing any extra work or complexity.
What do you dislike about the product?
Monitoring and performance tracking could be more user friendly. Even though the system is strong, having simpler, more focused insights would help new startups or hackathon teams learn faster.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
TiDB keeps user data and recommendations up-to-date and in sync, ensuring reliable nutrition advice. It handles structured health data safely, supports growth without slowing down, and is easy to maintain, letting us focus on AI orchestration and user experience.
Reliable and Scalable Database Solution
What do you like best about the product?
I find TiDB incredibly reliable, which is crucial for ServiceBridge when dealing with real services and financial transactions through an in-app wallet. The trustworthiness of TiDB ensures that our records and processes stay intact without any system issues. I also appreciate how seamlessly it grows without needing a complete overhaul, allowing our team to focus on enhancing the user experience rather than dealing with technical challenges. Plus, setting up the database with TiDB Cloud was simple and integrated easily with our existing tools.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are areas that could be improved. While the core system is stable, getting a good grasp of how performance behaves in a distributed SQL setup can be tricky, especially for teams used to working with traditional single node databases. Also, monitoring and performance insights could be made easier for smaller teams. Having a more intuitive way to see how queries are behaving and how the system scales would make it easier to learn and use.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use TiDB for reliable transaction management, ensuring accurate data during money transfers and confirmations. It grows seamlessly, preventing redesigns and technical challenges, allowing us to focus on enhancing user experience. TiDB is trustworthy, especially for handling real services and financial operations.
Revolutionized Resume Matching with Seamless Database Integration
What do you like best about the product?
I like that TiDB has native support for vectors along with full compatibility with SQL. It allows us to seamlessly use semantic similarity search while managing structured candidate data and compliance processes. Its built-in vector support means we can store embeddings and conduct cosine similarity searches directly with relational data without needing to maintain separate systems. I also value TiDB's scalability and serverless approach, which helps us handle an increasing number of resume uploads and recruiter searches without infrastructure setup or maintenance.
What do you dislike about the product?
One area that could use improvement is the need for more guidance and examples that specifically focus on optimizing vector search at a large scale. Although TiDB's built-in vector search support functions well, adjusting the performance of similarity searches and choosing the right indexing methods required some trial and error during development. More hands-on documentation that's relevant to real-world applications, like resume matching or recommendation systems, would help teams learn and apply best practices more quickly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
TiDB solves the challenge of merging semantic search with structured hiring by supporting both relational data and vector searches in one scalable solution. I like its scalability, serverless approach, and SQL compatibility, which help manage resume uploads and searches without extra infrastructure setup.
Scalable SQL Alternative, Yet Cloud Deployment Needs Improvement
What do you like best about the product?
I use TiDB for quick MVPs as a replacement for MySQL and PostgreSQL, especially for projects that need scalability. I like the helpful community managers and the abundance of documentation and tutorials available to understand the product. TiDB effectively solves the headache of scalability. I also appreciate the AI technologies offered by TiDB. Its MySQL compatibility, horizontal scaling, and high availability are features I value highly. I discovered tidb via the tidb hackathon on devpost.
What do you dislike about the product?
1. Some parts of the documentation feel advanced. More diagrams would be helpful. 2. No AI integration directly to the clusters/instances for valuable insights. 3. Cloud deployment was difficult.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use TiDB for scalability, transactional handling, and easy setup, especially for projects needing rapid development. It solves the headache of scalability with horizontal scaling and high availability.
Handles High Data Throughput and Analytics Seamlessly
What do you like best about the product?
I really appreciate how TiDB handles a lot of data coming in quickly and supports the execution of analytical queries effectively. It allows us to calculate volatility metrics and trigger alerts in real-time without managing separate systems. The scalability feature is great because as more users sign up and more trading pairs are monitored, the data increases rapidly, yet TiDB's distributed structure lets the system grow smoothly without the need for manual sharding or rewriting the database structure. Also, data consistency is a big positive, ensuring that price data, calculated values, and user alert settings are all in sync and dependable. The fact that it integrates well with MySQL made the integration smooth while still providing the advantage of a scalable distributed architecture.
What do you dislike about the product?
TiDB works well for our CryptoPulse workload, but understanding how to optimize distributed queries may need more learning than with a regular single node SQL database. Some queries had to be adjusted as the amount of data grew and having better performance tips for handling time series or high frequency data would be really useful.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use TiDB to handle high-frequency market data and analytics simultaneously, ensuring consistency and real-time calculations for cryptocurrency alerts. It scales smoothly with data growth and maintains data consistency, managing both transactional and analytical workloads without separate systems.
