Scale, strong consistency, and transactions together — a distributed key-value database built on Raft.

Welcome to TiKV: Distributed Transactional Key-Value Store.

TiKV is a distributed, transactional key-value database that scales horizontally while providing strong consistency and distributed ACID transactions — combining properties usually traded off against each other. This free book teaches it from the ground up: distributed-database fundamentals (sharding, replication, consistency, transactions), TiKV's architecture (the Placement Driver, TiKV nodes, regions), storage and region sharding/replication, the Raft consensus and multi-Raft design that deliver strong consistency at scale, distributed transactions with MVCC and a Percolator-style two-phase commit, the Placement Driver in depth, performance and scaling (and the hotspot pitfall), reliability and recovery, the relationship to TiDB, and operating TiKV in production. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that show how TiKV delivers database-grade correctness with distributed-system scalability.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What TiKV Is
2. Chapter 2 — Distributed Database Fundamentals
3. Chapter 3 — Architecture
4. Chapter 4 — Storage, Regions, and Replication
5. Chapter 5 — Raft and Strong Consistency
6. Chapter 6 — Distributed Transactions
7. Chapter 7 — The Placement Driver (PD)
8. Chapter 8 — Performance and Scaling
9. Chapter 9 — Reliability, Recovery, and the Ecosystem
10. Chapter 10 — Operating TiKV and Putting It Together