TiKV is a highly scalable, low latency, and easy to use key-value database that delivers performance less than 10 ms at any scale.

TiKV is intended to fill the role of a unified distributed storage layer. TiKV excels at working with large-scale data by supporting petabyte-scale deployments spanning trillions of rows.

As a graduate project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, TiKV is originally created by PingCAP to complement TiDB.

The Ti in TiKV stands for titanium. Titanium has the highest strength-to-density ratio than any other metallic elements and is named after the Titans of Greek mythology.

Architecture

A TiKV cluster consists of the following components:

• A group of TiKV nodes: store key-value pair data
• A group of Placement Driver (PD) nodes: work as the manager of the TiKV cluster

TiKV clients let you connect to a TiKV cluster and use raw (simple get/put) API or transaction (with transactional consistency guarantees) API to access and update your data. TiKV clients interact with PD and TiKV through gRPC.

For more information about the architecture, see Core concepts and architecture behind TiKV.

What’s Next

TiKV in 5 Minutes is strongly recommended if you want to try TiKV.