What is TiDB?
MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database that scales out for transactions, analytics and AI search.
Who is TiDB best for?
TiDB is best for engineering teams whose MySQL workloads have outgrown one server and need to scale out.
MySQL apps that outgrow one server
TiDB speaks MySQL 8.0 and scales out by adding nodes, with no downtime while the cluster grows.
Transactions and analytics together
TiKV stores rows for transactions while TiFlash keeps a columnar copy in real time, so reports run on live data.
Systems that cannot go down
Raft consensus keeps several replicas of each piece of data and fails over on its own when a node is lost.
AI and search features
Vector search runs in the same SQL database as your business data, so embeddings and records can be queried together.
How much does TiDB cost?
TiDB is free to self-host under Apache 2.0; TiDB Cloud Starter is free up to a monthly allowance and then billed by usage, and provisioned plans start at $400 a month.
- Apache 2.0, enterprise features included
- TiUP on Linux or TiDB Operator on Kubernetes
- You run upgrades, backups and scaling
- 25 GiB row and 25 GiB columnar storage free
- 250M Request Units a month free
- Scales to zero when idle, with spend limits
- Autoscaling within a limit you set
- Point-in-time recovery
- Storage and other services billed extra
- Node sizes and counts you choose
- AWS, Google Cloud or Azure
- Private endpoints and automated backups
Starter usage beyond the free allowance costs from $0.10 per million Request Units, $0.20 per GiB-month of row storage and $0.05 per GiB-month of columnar storage; the allowance covers up to five instances per organization. Premium starts at $1,800 a month for compute with isolated resources and 99.99% availability. Essential and Premium are in public preview, a bring-your-own-cloud option is offered, and rates vary by cloud and region. Full pricing on pingcap.com. We checked these prices on .
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Is TiDB open source?
Yes. TiDB's code is public under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can run it on your own server.
On GitHub
40,733stars
+90 (+0.2%) in the last 30 days
- Last commit
- 12 Nov
- Repository age
- 11 years
- Latest release
- 17 Sep
- Licence
- Apache 2.0
- Self-hosted
- Yes
- Repository
- pingcap/tidb
What are the best TiDB alternatives?
TiDB is an open source alternative to PlanetScale. Supabase does the same job and is open source too.
Questions about TiDB
What is TiDB?
MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database that scales out for transactions, analytics and AI search.
Who is TiDB for?
TiDB is best for engineering teams whose MySQL workloads have outgrown one server and need to scale out.
Is TiDB free?
Yes. TiDB has a free Self-hosted plan: apache 2.0, enterprise features included.
How much does TiDB cost?
TiDB's paid plans are Essential at From $400 per month, compute and Dedicated at From $1,376 per month, cluster.
Is TiDB open source?
Yes. TiDB's code is public under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can run it on your own server.
What are the best TiDB alternatives?
The closest alternatives on Recaply are PlanetScale and Supabase.
Where can I try TiDB?
On its official website, pingcap.com.
Is TiDB compatible with MySQL?
Yes. TiDB is compatible with MySQL 8.0, so apps connect with the usual MySQL drivers, ORMs and tools. PingCAP says most applications move over with no code changes or only small ones.
How many servers does TiDB need?
A basic test cluster runs 2 TiDB, 3 TiKV and 3 PD instances, which TiUP Playground can start on one machine. For production, PingCAP recommends at least 8 CPU cores each for TiDB, TiKV and TiFlash, with NVMe SSDs for TiKV.
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