TiKV is a fully open-source, distributed transactional key-value database developed by PingCAP and now a CNCF graduated project. Designed for high scalability, strong consistency, and low latency, it’s ideal for cloud-native and large-scale applications. While TiKV is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license, commercial alternatives include Amazon DynamoDB, Google Cloud Spanner, and FoundationDB.
Key Features:
- Scalability: TiKV can scale horizontally to handle petabytes of data by adding more nodes to the cluster.
- Consistency: It supports ACID transactions and ensures data consistency using the Raft consensus algorithm.
- Low Latency: Optimized for low-latency reads and writes, making it suitable for online serving and real-time applications.
- Distributed Transactions: Supports distributed transactions with snapshot isolation, providing a consistent view of data across the cluster.
- Pluggable Storage Engine: Uses RocksDB as the default storage engine, but allows for other storage engines to be plugged in.
- Cloud-Native: Designed to be deployed and managed in cloud environments, with support for Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies.
Use Cases:
- Database Storage Layer: Used as the storage engine for distributed SQL databases like TiDB, providing scalability and consistency.
- Online Feature Store: Stores and serves features for machine learning models in real-time.
- Metadata Storage: Stores metadata for distributed systems, such as object storage services.
- Key-Value Store: General-purpose key-value store for applications requiring high scalability and consistency.
