In a recent conversation with CIO&Leader, Bhanu Jamwal, Head of Presales and Solution Engineering, APAC, at PingCAP talks about how the enterprise is solving the challenges of enterprises and what data means to PingCAP.
Head of Presales and Solution Engineering, APAC, PingCAP
PingCAP, a leading infrastructure company, was founded in 2015, which also developed TiDB, an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database compatible with MySQL. TiDB has become one of the most popular open-source database projects, and its unique Key-Value storage layer, TiKV, is a CNCF Graduated project.
In a recent conversation with CIO&Leader, Bhanu Jamwal, Head of Presales and Solution Engineering, APAC, at PingCAP talks about how the enterprise is solving the challenges of enterprises and what data means to PingCAP.
Bhanu Jamwal is experienced in data implementation with use of Open Source tools and heterogeneous large-scale enterprise data implementations, with 21+ years of experience in the industry.
CIO&Leader: What are the problems that you are solving for enterprises? Can you share details about some of the use cases?
Bhanu Jamwal: PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, a platform which features horizontal scalability, strong consistency and high availability. Organizations worldwide leverage TiDB across various applications, from recommendation engines to hyperscale operational workloads. Some of the key challenges with the traditional standalone databases is their inability to meet the data capacity requirements of rapidly growing applications. In addition, there is an immediate need to handle requirements for data consistency, reliability, availability, scalability, and disaster tolerance.
TiDB platform, an open source, distributed SQL database, is delivering benefits to the clients in so many ways. Some of the use cases of our solutions include:
Scalability:TiDB’s separate computing and storage architecture allows for easy scaling of computing or storage capacity separately, compared to traditional databases, supporting high concurrency and petabyte-level data storage. TiDB allows enterprises to scale out and in quickly without downtime, making it easier to handle peak transaction loads.
Real-time HTAP Scenarios: TiDB is well suited for two key workload scenarios for modern and rapidly growing applications. The first one is termed transactional workloads which enable and support heavy transactional processing of up and beyond billion transactions a day. The second scenario is to support performing analytics in realtime on the transactional data in the first scenario. TiDB supports both these scenarios on one single database. This hybrid approach of supporting both scenarios is termed as Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) and TiDB is one of the most advanced HTAP databases in the current database industry. TiDB helps businesses to derive business insights from their data quickly.
Simplified database operations: TiDB’s compatibility with the MySQL ecosystem and data migration tools make it easier to migrate applications and manage data processing tasks efficiently. TiDB simplifies database operations, making it easier for enterprises to manage their data infrastructure efficiently.
CIO&Leader: What is the role of distributed systems in addressing the scalability and reliability challenges of modern applications?
Bhanu Jamwal: As data volumes increase, the traditional relational databases struggle to maintain the performance and scalability which eventually leads to performance degradation. Addressing these issues requires workarounds which include additional infrastructure, data processing tools, manual data sharding, application changes etc, which, in turn, leads to technical complexity for developers, poor real-time performance, and higher data storage costs.
Distributed databases tackle these challenges effectively. They power business-critical transactional applications with a SQL-compatible tech stack, providing elastic scaling, and continuous access to data—all in a single database. Data is distributed across multiple nodes, allowing for elastic scalability, relentless reliability, data consistency, high availability and faster query processing of mixed workloads. They have revolutionized the way organizations handle their data and they play a major role in elevating modern application development.
CIO&Leader: How modernizing your database drives better business outcomes?
Bhanu Jamwal: Modernizing a database like TiDB drives better business outcomes by enabling organizations to focus on building applications for the future without worrying about complex data infrastructure management.
For rapidly growing businesses, it is crucial to choose a data platform which can support their modern applications by providing elastic scalability, high availability for business continuity, deliver and support performance with ever growing user base, ability to perform real-time analytics for swift and accurate decision-making process, contributing towards overall cost effectiveness.
Distributed SQL databases are excellent solutions for driving better business outcomes. Here are a few ways in which they unlock business values: Accelerate productivity by building new features and apps faster; Reduce costs by doing more business with less infrastructure; Lower risk by ensuring continuous access to data anywhere in the world; and Increase innovation by generating real-time operational insights on transactional data.
CIO&Leader: Who are your clients in India? What are the new innovations that you are working upon?
Bhanu Jamwal: We work with one of the largest e-commerce companies and a leading logistics player in India. The logistics player was struggling to provide a real-time view of their daily operations to their ground staff in order for them to make effective and timely decisions to their parcel lifecycle. After adopting TiDB, the business can now perform real-time analytics and get timely access to their parcel tracking insights leading to an effective parcel management.
At TiDB, we’re excited about our latest innovation: TiDB Serverless. This fully managed Database-as-a-Service now features built-in vector search capabilities, enabling more effective AI application development within the MySQL ecosystem. With vector search, TiDB Serverless can perform searches based on the meaning of words, not just exact matches, which is crucial for handling unstructured data accurately.
TiDB Serverless also scales elastically to meet AI demands, stores vector embeddings with structured data, and performs in-depth semantic searches. This makes it a powerful tool for developers working with AI and machine learning, simplifying the integration of advanced database functions and AI features.
CIO&Leader: Data workload is a significant challenge faced by CIOs today. How are you addressing this challenge, while also ensuring reliable and secure performance?
Bhanu Jamwal: With the exponential growth of data, managing workloads becomes a critical challenge. PingCAP prioritizes alleviating these data challenges, assisting clients in unlocking business value. As organizations grapple with data exceeding their capacity, they require high-performing databases capable of seamless scalability. Platforms like TiDB Cloud, PingCAP’s fully managed Database as a Service (DBaaS), are tailored to address these scalability hurdles. Catering to digital native businesses in India, including fintech, BFSI, e-commerce, retail, and media, PingCAP’s TiDB solution proves instrumental. TiDB serves as the core transaction database, streamlining operations and reducing complexity. Its transparent, distributed computing and storage features cut maintenance costs while ensuring flexibility.
TiDB addresses the challenge of data workload for CIOs by providing a solution that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads, including real-time data consistency between different systems during data synchronization. TiDB’s HTAP capability can handle hundreds of thousands of queries per second (QPS) with mixed requests, such as advertising details, index filtering, and analytical queries related to columnstore and MPP architecture. The database’s architecture design allows for easy scaling out or scaling in of computing or storage capacity online as needed, ensuring reliable performance during peak hours.
Additionally, TiDB’s financial-grade high availability ensures strong data consistency and availability, with data stored in multiple replicas and transaction logs managed using the Multi-Raft protocol. TiDB also offers cloud-native distributed database features, allowing for flexible scalability, reliability, and security on the cloud platform. The compatibility with the MySQL protocol and ecosystem simplifies application migration without significant code changes.
Overall, TiDB’s features and capabilities make it a reliable and secure option for handling diverse data workloads for CIOs, while also providing cost savings and simplified architecture.
