Case Study: China Telecom Bestpay achieves 3–5x data processing efficiency with PingCAP TiDB

How We Process Data Five Times More Efficiently Using a Scale-Out MySQL Alternative

China Telecom Bestpay, the mobile payment and Internet finance subsidiary of China Telecom Corp., needed a more scalable and efficient database to keep up with rapid growth, strict regulatory requirements, and increasingly heavy batch-processing and reconciliation workloads. Its MySQL-based and sharded environment struggled with large data volumes, long processing times, and limited storage duration, prompting the company to evaluate a scale-out alternative from PingCAP: TiDB, a MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database.

PingCAP implemented TiDB across Bestpay’s personal billing, reconciliation, and anti-money laundering systems using a phased migration strategy. The results were substantial: batch processing improved by more than 3x, anti-money laundering processing increased by 5x, reconciliation performance doubled, and key reconciliation jobs dropped from 3–5 minutes to 1–2 minutes or about 1 minute. Bestpay also expanded table capacity to nearly 10 billion rows, extended data retention to 3–5 years or longer, and improved query performance with 50% higher QPS and 20%–30% lower latency.

China Telecom Bestpay

Yu Liu

Senior Architect