Case Study: Xiaohongshu achieves real-time analytics and scalable HTAP performance with PingCAP TiDB

How We Use a Scale-Out HTAP Database for Real-Time Analytics and Complex Queries

Xiaohongshu, the China-based social media and e-commerce platform also known as RED or Little Red Book, was struggling to support rapid growth, real-time analytics, and complex queries across massive data volumes. With more than 300 million registered users and over 100 million new rows of data per day, the company needed a database that could handle both transactional and analytical workloads, scale horizontally, and avoid the operational burden of managing large sharded MySQL environments.

To solve this, Xiaohongshu adopted PingCAP’s TiDB HTAP database, including TiFlash for analytical performance and MySQL compatibility for easy migration. PingCAP’s solution enabled real-time queries on sharded data, ACID transactions, JOINs, and fast analytics without impacting online applications; replication latency was reduced to under one second, TiFlash improved aggregate query performance by 3x to 10x and cut average execution time by about 68%, and the company also gained better workload isolation and simpler scaling.

Xiaohongshu

Yihao Zhang

Senior Development Engineer