Distributed SQL ACID Latency: TiDB, CockroachDB & Spanner

Distributed SQL ACID Latency: TiDB, CockroachDB & Spanner Answer-first: Distributed SQL engines preserve multi-region ACID serializability by combining Raft/Paxos consensus with bounded clock synchronization protocols such as Spanner TrueTime, CockroachDB HLC, or TiDB Percolator TSO. Selecting optimal commit-wait delays and timestamp allocation strategies minimizes two-phase commit overhead, achieving low transaction latencies across cross-region core banking nodes. Executive Summary & Quick Answer: Distributed SQL engines (TiDB Percolator, CockroachDB HLC, Google Spanner TrueTime) balance multi-region ACID compliance with low-latency commitments. Understanding clock drift bounds (TrueTime 2-7ms wait) vs TSO central allocator overhead is critical for tuning financial transaction latency under cross-region replication. ...

June 18, 2026 · 12 min · Lê Tuấn Anh

PayPay Data Infrastructure: TiDB & MySQL Sharding in Go

Executive Summary & Quick Answer: PayPay migrated its database layer from AWS Aurora MySQL to TiDB Distributed SQL to overcome vertical scaling limitations. TiDB’s Raft-based auto-sharding and horizontal compute/storage separation deliver linear scaling under billion-row transaction tables. Answer-First: PayPay utilizes TiDB as its distributed SQL database to achieve horizontal scaling without manual database sharding. TiDB maintains standard MySQL protocol compatibility and strict ACID guarantees while dynamically splitting tables into regions that are distributed across a multi-node cluster. ...

May 5, 2026 · 8 min · Lê Tuấn Anh