How We Scale Out Databases and Get Big Data Queries 6x Faster with a MySQL Alternative | PingCAP
Huya Live, China's Twitch, is one of the largest live streaming platforms in China. It mainly focuses on video game live streaming, covering 3,800 games. In addition, it offers a wide range of other live broadcasts, including traditional sports, cooking, music, beauty, outdoor, and reality shows. It has 178 million+ monthly active users. It operates globally as Nimo TV, with 30 million+ monthly active users.
At Huya Live, we use MySQL as our main database. As our business grew, our storage capacity became a bottleneck. We tried sharding, but it had many drawbacks. In Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) scenarios, our live broadcasts had high latency, and our database maintenance cost was high.
To solve these problems, we chose TiDB, an open-source, high-performance, distributed SQL database. Now, we use TiDB in real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), database sharding, and big data offline scenarios. It helps us achieve database scalability, high availability, and strong consistency with low costs. In our big data offline application, our queries are 6x faster. In our near real-time OLAP application, our query performance improved by more than 2x.
In this post, I'll share our database challenges, why we chose TiDB to solve our pain points, how we use it, and our future plans. I hope our experience can inspire you if you ever need to select a database.
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