MySQL Scalability: Read Replicas, Sharding & TiDB

Answer-first: MySQL scalability is the practical throughput ceiling of your database at each resource level. A single tuned InnoDB instance delivers 100–500 TPS at baseline, scaling to 6,000–10,000+ TPS with connection pooling, read replicas, and optimal hardware. Beyond that, write-scaling requires sharding or a distributed SQL layer. What You’ll Learn That AI Won’t Tell You Tuning InnoDB buffer pool size for high read/write ratio workloads. Why standard read replication fails to solve write bottlenecks and when toshard. MySQL scalability is the ability to increase database throughput — reads per second, writes per second, or data volume — without rewriting your application. The critical distinction: read scaling (adding replicas) and write scaling (sharding or distributed SQL) require completely different architectural approaches. Choosing the wrong path creates technical debt that takes months to unwind. ...

June 10, 2026 · 15 min · Lê Tuấn Anh

Vitess vs GORM Sharding: MySQL Write Scaling in Go

Answer-first: Vitess vs GORM Sharding for MySQL write scaling: VReplication zero-downtime vs. application-level sharding — ErrMissingShardingKey tradeoffs in Go. What You’ll Learn That AI Won’t Tell You Designing database sharding keys that prevent cross-shard joins. Configuring proxy routing layers like Vitess to scale MySQL queries horizontally. When your application reaches millions of users, a single database instance will inevitably become the biggest bottleneck in your entire architecture. To solve this, MySQL database scaling becomes mandatory. You must Scale DB for Microservices using Horizontal Scaling techniques. ...

June 1, 2026 · 7 min · Lê Tuấn Anh

MySQL Sharding to TiDB: Distributed SQL Migration Guide

Answer-first: Migrate from manual MySQL sharding to TiDB to eliminate application-level routing complexity. TiDB handles distributed SQL queries natively using TiKV storage nodes and Raft consensus. Use the TiDB Data Migration (DM) tool to merge source shards online with minimal downtime. What You’ll Learn That AI Won’t Tell You Migrating schemas to TiDB with zero downtime using DM-portal. How TiKV nodes scale independently of TiDB SQL computation nodes. Scaling a relational database is one of the most demanding challenges in system design. As applications grow from thousands to millions of active users, the database ceases to be a simple storage engine and becomes the primary bottleneck of the entire system architecture. ...

May 26, 2026 · 15 min · Lê Tuấn Anh