TiDB Cloud

PingCAP started in 2015 and is the company behind TiDB, an open-source distributed SQL database with MySQL compatibility. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Singapore and Tokyo. TiDB addresses the need to scale transactional systems without manual sharding while also running analytics and AI retrieval on the same data.

TiDB separates compute and storage; its TiKV storage layer is a CNCF Graduated project, and a columnar engine serves analytical queries. A single SQL statement can combine transactional, analytical and vector queries without ETL. TiDB Cloud is offered as Starter (scale to zero), Essential, Dedicated and Premium tiers on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, alongside TiDB Self-Managed. Newer services include TiDB Cloud Lake for analytics and search and PostgreSQL support in preview. Users include Pinterest, Atlassian, Rakuten, Mercari and Plaid.

• Distributed SQL: MySQL-compatible database that scales out across nodes with ACID transactions.
• HTAP engine: Row and columnar storage let transactional and analytical queries run on live data.
• Vector search: Native vector indexing supports retrieval-augmented generation and AI agent workloads.
• Serverless Starter tier: Autoscaling with scale-to-zero, instant branching and spend limits.
• Multi-cloud deployment: TiDB Cloud runs on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, or self-managed on own infrastructure.
• Developer tooling: Online DDL, an MCP server and integrations with LangChain and LlamaIndex.

A Vietnamese e-wallet or fintech can move its MySQL ledger to TiDB to scale transactions while running real-time risk reports on the same data. An e-commerce platform can serve product search and recommendation with vector queries next to order data. A game studio can consolidate many MySQL shards into one cluster.

Horizontal scaling with autoscaling and independent compute and storage removes the need for manual sharding of MySQL workloads. Running transactions, analytics and vector search in one engine reduces separate pipelines and stores. The Starter tier begins at $0 with a free allowance of 25 GiB row storage, 25 GiB columnar storage and 250M request units. Case studies cite Atlassian consolidating more than 750 PostgreSQL clusters and Plaud reaching 10x QPS.

Fast-growing digital businesses in Southeast Asia such as e-wallets, e-commerce and gaming outgrow single-node MySQL and look for distributed databases that avoid manual sharding. At the same time, AI applications push teams to combine operational data, analytics and vector search in fewer systems.

PingCAP started in 2015; headquarters at 440 N Wolfe Rd, Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Singapore and Tokyo. TiKV is a CNCF Graduated project. The pricing page shows ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27701, SOC, PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA badges. Recognized as a G2 Grid Leader.