MySQL Meetup - March 2026

This month we'll continue our discussion about what to do with large databases at the Velvet Hippo in Downtown Durham. This location is in walking distance from any of our members attending All Things AI at the Durham Convention Center and Carolina Theater. We have a special guest who is in town for the event, and look forward to hearing more on the topic from him.

Relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL have served us well, but scaling them has always been a challenge. A new generation of open source Distributed SQL databases addresses this head-on, offering strong consistency, built-in resilience, and the ability to scale storage and compute independently. Sunny Bains of TiDB will lead a discussion on the core ideas behind this architecture, how it solves problems that traditional replication can't, and where the technology is headed.

Sunny has been working on database storage engines since 2001. He was a lead on MySQL/InnoDB and is the primary author of MySQL Full-Text Search and Parallel DDL, among other core features, and has been a committed open source contributor since 2006. He is currently an Architect at PingCAP, working on TiDB, an open source, MySQL-compatible Distributed SQL database used in production at LinkedIn, Databricks, Pinterest, and Airbnb.