PingCAP’s Top 10 Posts of 2022

2022 has been a year of accomplishments for PingCAP. We released many product innovations such as TiDB 6.0 and TiDB Cloud Serverless Tier, and made many bold decisions including making TiFlash open source. We also gained a lot of recognition from developers, customers, users, partners, analysts, and many other stakeholders. 

2022 has also been a fruitful year for our blog writers. We published 80 technical articles highlighting PingCAP’s most up-to-date technological innovations, cutting-edge tech trends, engineering deep dives, and step-by-step developer tutorials. Many of those articles have also been featured on prominent sites such as Hacker News, DZone, The New Stack, VMblog, and InfoQ. This further strengthens our tech leadership in the world of databases and innovations. 

Curious about which posts are the most popular? Here we list the Top 10 most read posts published in 2022. We hope you enjoy reading them. 

TOP 10 most read posts published in 2022

#1 The Next Generation Database (by Rick Golba)

We are in a revolutionary era with the amount of data expanding every second. How can your business adapt and succeed in this unprecedented era of information? In this post, we discuss the considerations for such a digital transformation and suggest a path toward success. 

#2 Why We Must Make Data as Accessible as Water or Electricity (by Max Liu) 

Data powers the modern world. Organizations of all types depend on massive, rapidly growing, and evolving datasets to deliver more intelligent services and achieve business growth. Given its importance and ubiquity, data should be treated as a utility—just like water, gas, and electricity. But how do we achieve this? Read this post to explore the answers. 

#3 Long Live MySQL: Good Old MySQL Should Be Rejuvenated (by Ed Huang) 

MySQL is ubiquitous, and loved by so many engineers, including those here at PingCAP. In this post, Ed Huang, Co-founder and CTO of PingCAP, shares his personal experiences with MySQL, his thoughts on why MySQL has been prevalent for decades, and most importantly, some challenges MySQL has faced in recent years.

#4 The Beauty of HTAP: TiDB and AlloyDB as Examples (by Yu Dong) 

For decades, online transactional and analytical workloads have been processed separately by different database systems. This approach has worked well for a long time, but it also causes complicated data challenges that limit company growth. In this post, we share a hybrid approach: HTAP databases. We also discuss their benefits by diving into two HTAP representatives: TiDB from PingCAP and AlloyDB from Google.

#5 How I Found a Go Issue on ARM that Crashed the Database Server (by Arthur Mao) 

TiDB’s architecture has a layered design, and the computing layer is implemented in Go. During a TiDB performance test, our engineers found a peculiar Go issue that caused TiDB to crash on the Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) platform. In this article, Arthur Mao describes this issue and how his team helped solve it. 

#6 Some Notes on the DynamoDB 2022 Paper (by Ed Huang)

In this post, Ed Huang, Co-founder and CTO of PingCAP, shares his thoughts on an important technical paper he read recently: “Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service.” 

#7 How an HTAP Database Handles OLTP and OLAP Workloads at the Same Time (by Shawn Ma)

Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing, or HTAP, has created a buzz in the database world this year. What is HTAP? What are its benefits and most fit scenarios? In this post, Shawn Ma, the architect behind TiDB’s HTAP architecture, gives his answers and explains how the engineering team designs TiDB, an open source HTAP database, to tackle complex problems. 

#8 Achieving Better Price to Performance for a Distributed Database – Tau T2A or AWS Graviton2 (by Huansheng Chen)

The testing team conducted a benchmarking test to compare the price-performance ratio between Google ARM 64 and AWS ARM 64 when we ran TiDB on them. Read this post for detailed results. 

#9 Real-World HTAP: A Look at TiDB and SingleStore and Their Architectures (by Ghimsim Chua)

We have seen an increasing number of HTAP capable databases from both well-established players like Google and startups like PingCAP in recent years. Why is that? What are the differences between different HTAP databases? In this post, we’ll take you through SingleStore and TiDB and compare their architecture differences. 

#10 The Long Expedition toward Making a Real-Time HTAP Database (by Shawn Ma)

This post talks about HTAP, again. Actually, TiDB was an OLTP database in the beginning, but how has it evolved to be an HTAP database? What are the reasons and stories behind such a big architectural switch? In this post, Shawn Ma, the architect behind TiDB’s HTAP architecture, gives us the answers. 

Biggest thanks to our readers

We’d like to give our biggest thanks to you all, our readers, for spending time on our posts. Your interest, support, and feedback have always been an invaluable resource, and inspire us to keep writing and innovating. 

In 2023, we’ll continue to write more, share more, and offer more. Feel free to subscribe to our blog for the most up-to-date information. 

We wish you a happy new year blessed with abundance and success.