TiDB X: Context-aware scaling for distributed SQL with object storage backbone

Ask any engineering team managing a modern application today, and you’ll hear the same frustrations: traffic spikes that can’t be predicted, autoscalers that react too slowly, and workloads that look nothing like they did yesterday. One hour you’re processing transactions, the next you’re serving analytical or vector queries — all in real time, all under pressure to keep costs flat.

Yet most databases still scale the way they always have: blindly adding more resources in lockstep, forcing businesses into a painful tradeoff between overprovisioning and wasting budget or under-provisioning and breaking SLAs.

Today, at SCaiLE Summit 2025, we’re announcing TiDB X – a breakthrough new architecture for TiDB that redefines how distributed SQL databases scale.

The TiDB X Breakthrough: Object Storage at the Core

At the heart of TiDB X is a cloud-native object storage backbone. Instead of tying compute and storage together, we’ve decoupled them. Compute nodes scale independently, pulling from a shared object store and caching hot data locally for ultra-low latency. Raft consensus ensures strong consistency across the system.

This shift unlocks something no other distributed SQL database has delivered at this scale: context-aware scaling. TiDB continuously reads signals like QPS, latency, query mix, and data types, then adapts in real time – making sure your database is always the right size for the moment.

Beyond Scale: Built for AI

AI applications and agents are redefining what databases need to do. It’s no longer just about storage and retrieval. They require long-term memory, smarter retrieval, and real-time reasoning across diverse data types. That’s why, alongside TiDB X, we’re introducing new Generative and Agentic AI innovations:

• Unified Retrieval & Reasoning: A new engine that combines vectors, knowledge graphs, JSON, and SQL to answer richer, multi-hop queries.
• Long-Term Memory: Durable, branchable, versioned storage that lets AI agents “remember” and adapt over time.
• Plug-and-Play LLM Integrations: Out-of-the-box support for OpenAI, Hugging Face, Cohere, Gemini, Jina, NVIDIA, and more.
• AI Developer Toolkit: New SDKs, a reasoning engine, and an MCP server to help developers build agentic applications faster.

Together, these innovations turn TiDB into more than a database. They make it the intelligent infrastructure for AI-powered applications and enterprise agents.

Why This Matters for You

• Elastic by design: Expand or contract storage in minutes so you can handle sudden spikes without overpaying or overprovisioning.
• Smarter economics: Usage-based pricing and RU/s enforcement so your database costs stay predictable and aligned with real demand.
• One platform for every workload: Run OLTP, analytics, vector, and AI queries together so your teams stop stitching multiple databases just to ship features.
• Battle-tested reliability: Get the agility of serverless with the consistency of dedicated clusters so you can move fast without risking downtime or data loss.
• Freedom of choice: Deploy on TiDB Cloud or in your own cloud so you stay in control of spend, compliance, and architecture.

A Decade of Leadership, A New Chapter of Innovation

TiDB already powers some of the world’s largest companies – including Pinterest, Block, and Databricks – with production workloads at global scale. With TiDB X, we’re building on that foundation to deliver the most significant architectural leap since the original launch of TiDB.

This isn’t just an evolution. It’s a rethinking of what a distributed SQL database should be in the era of AI-driven applications.

Looking Ahead

TiDB X will be available across all TiDB Cloud tiers – Starter, Essentials (Public preview soon), Premium, and BYOC will be available later in 2025. Classic TiDB will continue to be supported, giving you flexibility to adopt at your own pace.

The future of data infrastructure won’t be about bolting on more point solutions. It will be about unifying workloads on adaptive, intelligent platforms that scale with the needs of modern applications.

With TiDB X, PingCAP is proud to lead that charge.