Empowering India’s Developer Community: TiDB’s Initiatives in Building Next-Gen Database Expertise
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Bhanu Jamwal, Head of Presales and Solution Engineering, APAC, TiDB
- Can you elaborate on TiDB’s recent recognition as a ‘Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer’?
Garter has recognized TiDB as a ‘Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer under Cloud Database Management Systems category. Gartner Peer Insights is a free peer review and ratings platform designed for enterprise software and services decision makers. The “Voice of the Customer” is a document that applies a methodology to aggregated Gartner Peer Insights’ reviews in a market to provide an overall perspective for IT decision makers.
This recognition underscores our dedication to delivering unmatched scalability, performance, and reliability for our customers, meeting the demands of the modern enterprise. In our view, vendors are ranked based on top ratings in overall experience, product capabilities, and service and support, relative to industry standards.
As of March 2024, among all eligible vendors, TiDB was one of only two providers to achieve the highest overall peer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. With 68 reviews, TiDB received a 97% recommendation rate from customers and high scores across product capabilities, sales experience, deployment, and support.
2. Can you tell us about TiDB’s initiatives towards empowerment of developer community in India?
India has emerged as a global powerhouse in software development, boasting the world’s second-largest developer ecosystem. The growing pool of skilled developers in India is a key factor attracting global companies and making India a major market for tech investment. Many Fortune 500 companies already have GCCs in India, a testament to the trust in Indian developers’ capabilities to build world-class applications.
PingCAP is actively engaging with the developer community in India to address traditional database challenges and promote the adoption of distributed SQL systems like TiDB. Through PingCAP University, we offer courses and certifications to enhance skills in managing distributed SQL databases, helping developers and IT professionals understand TiDB’s capabilities in large-scale data scenarios. We deepen our ties with the local IT community through workshops, training sessions, and hackathons, contributing to local talent development and innovation.
We also foster community engagement by providing extensive documentation, developer guides, and a community forum to support developers transitioning to modern distributed systems. As an open-source project, TiDB encourages contributions from Indian developers, allowing them to influence the technology, gain recognition, and improve the software.
Our active participation in key industry events such as the FinTech Festival India, GIDS, Yourstory, Kissflow CTO, Linkedin event and AWS Summit demonstrates our commitment to empowering the developer community.
3. How do distributed SQL databases like TiDB help enterprises manage complex data challenges?
The shift towards distributed SQL like TiDB, addresses scalability challenges of traditional databases. TiDB’s distributed architecture allows businesses to scale horizontally, overcoming single-machine limitations. With automatic sharding and separation of storage and computing, enterprises can seamlessly manage and expand their data infrastructure in the cloud, fostering innovation and growth.
distributed SQL database solves challenges by offering several key benefits below:
Horizontal scalability: It can scale horizontally by adding more nodes, and handling increased loads without performance degradation, unlike traditional vertical scaling.
Automatic sharding: Advanced distributed SQL database automates sharding, distributing data across nodes to balance loads and prevent bottlenecks, unlike the manual, error-prone sharding in traditional databases.
Separation of storage and compute: They separate storage and compute, allowing independent scaling of resources, which is ideal for dynamic cloud environments.
High availability and strong consistency: They ensure high availability and strong consistency, maintaining functionality even during node failures.
Real-time HTAP: Advanced distributed SQL database supports both transactional and analytical workloads, simplifying architecture by eliminating the need for separate OLTP and OLAP systems.
Cloud-native design: It supports elastic scaling and deployment in various cloud environments.
MySQL Compatibility: TiDB’s compatibility with MySQL allows users to migrate applications from MySQL to TiDB with minimal changes in most cases.
4. How does TiDB solves data challenges faced by SaaS platforms?
As SaaS providers continue to grow and acquire new customers, the volume of data they manage is expanding exponentially, and the limitations of traditional databases are increasingly hindering their ability to scale efficiently.
TiDB offers the following advantages over traditional databases:
- Handle Hybrid Transaction and Analytical Processing (HTAP)workloads: It combines the capabilities of Online Transactional Processing and Online Analytical Processing within a single system. This unified architecture allows the database to handle both transactional and analytical workloads efficiently without the need for separate systems. A common HTAP scenario for SaaS businesses involves processing transactional data and frequently updating dashboards to reflect these changes. This requires queries that retrieve data from multiple database tables using multiple joins. Single node databases struggle with performance for such queries whereas TiDB effectively processes them with its HTAP architecture.
- Multi-Tenant: TiDB is a multi-tenant database that enables SaaS applications to create and manage metadata and business data for multiple tenants within a single database, eliminating the need for separate databases per tenant. This reduces the complexity of replicating metadata changes across multiple databases. Additionally, TiDB prevents “noisy neighbour” issues by implementing resource control, ensuring balanced resource management across tenants.
- Respond at speed: TiDB is agile in query speed and user interface performance, responding to queries in sub-seconds at low latency.
- Handle complicated and highly customized data: Many SaaS vendors provide the option to customize the settings to tenants including queries, data transformations, and relationships. The combination of custom objects integrated with many custom fields can be quite complicated; TiDB effectively handle such situations.
- High availability: It is highly available keeping the system up and surviving possible disasters.
- Horizontal scalability: As SaaS platforms deal with a huge volume of data and continuous expansion in volume, horizontal scalability feature of TiDB helps them scale enormously.
- Strong consistency: Given so much data processing, it is extremely hard to keep strong consistency by SaaS vendors. TiDB maintains consistency throughout the entire system.
5. How is PingCAP looking to tap opportunity in India market?
India being one of the fastest growing economies in the world, presents a highly promising market for our growth strategy. With the number of use cases for companies across sectors, we want to emerge as a top choice for Indian enterprises to manage their data environment. We are dedicated to accelerate our growth in India and are looking at fivefold growth in the country within next three years, leveraging rapid digitization in the country and available of highly qualified talent pool. As India’s digital economy is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, PingCAP is strategically positioned to play a vital role in achieving this ambitious goal. Our vision is centered on strengthening our presence in India through strategic team expansion and dedicated support for the developer community in India.
