Case Study: Shopee scales its databases and reduces sharding complexity with PingCAP TiDB

Shopee runs 20+ TiDB clusters with PingCAP for 200+ TB of data

Shopee, a leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, faced severe challenges in scaling its back-end database systems to meet rapidly growing demand. Their existing MySQL infrastructure was struggling with terabyte-scale data and high write queries per second, making database selection critical. To address this, Shopee partnered with vendor PingCAP to find a scalable solution.

PingCAP provided its TiDB database, an open-source, MySQL-compatible HTAP solution. Shopee implemented TiDB for log storage, data aggregation from MySQL shards, and as a primary database for new applications, eliminating the need for complex sharding. The results were significant: by the end of 2019, Shopee had deployed over 20 TiDB clusters comprising 400+ nodes to manage 200+ TB of data. This solution provided horizontal scalability, eased maintenance, and allowed the platform to handle its massive data growth efficiently.

Shopee