tiflash

really admire our courage - we chose Rust which was just released 1.0 and missed lots of libraries at that time. Now it seems that this is an awesome choice, TiKV has been graduated from CNCF, and been used as building block not only for TiDB, but also for other distributed systems. Thanks Rust. When TiDB started being used in many companies, we found that our customer not only ran lots of online transactions in TiDB, but also they wanted to ran some realtime analytic queries directly because the data has been in TiDB already. So we decided to build a HTAP database, to introduce a column storage beside TiKV, this is TiFlash (https://github.com/pingcap/tiflash). We build TiFlash based on Clickhouse, so of course, we use C++. As you can see, to build only one integrated database - TiDB, we at least use three languages, every language has its own reason to be introduced. We can treat the distributed database as a service system, each service can be built with your favorite language and the services are linked by gRPC like TiDB does now. You may doubt that - “hey, guys, you are building a database, performance is very importance”. Yes, this is true, but we also build a complex distributed system, especially on the cloud. Scale-out, elastic, user experience must be important too. This is trade off for an engineer :-)