Case Study: Bank of Beijing achieves zero-downtime horizontal scaling with PingCAP TiDB

How We Use a Distributed Database to Achieve Horizontal Scaling Without Downtime

Bank of Beijing, a major urban commercial bank in China, needed a horizontally scalable database that could handle highly concurrent requests, support rapid business growth, and reduce the risks and costs of traditional single-vendor architectures. To meet these needs, the bank selected PingCAP’s open-source distributed SQL database, TiDB, for its banking and financial transaction workloads.

PingCAP implemented TiDB in a multi-DC, high-availability architecture across two cities, using a primary-secondary setup and Kafka binlog replication. The solution helped Bank of Beijing achieve horizontal scaling and zero-downtime operations, including during peak shopping-festival traffic of 7,500 QPS—more than 10 times normal levels—while also supporting online lending batch jobs and broader financial systems.

Bank of Beijing

Zhendong Chen

Software Development Engineer