Introduction to TiDB - July 2025

Over the last few decades, organizations with data intensive workloads have largely turned to SQL and NoSQL. However, while these databases solve the immediate problem of scale, they make major sacrifices in data integrity, hard-to-detect data corruption, application complexity, rigidity, and resistance to data change.

TiDB is an open source, distributed SQL database that evolves this story in major ways. Its multi-writer architecture allows for scaling throughput linearly while maintaining strong ACID compliance. By decoupling storage and compute, TiDB’s compute layer is stateless and independently scalable. This means improved fault tolerance over similar systems, lightning fast compute scale-out, and a better use of resources.

In this webinar, PingCAP Solution Architect Matthew Penaroza shares the design goals and architecture of TiDB, and how it leverages these to keep performance stable as it horizontally scales—not just in online traffic but in schema changes as well.