Meituan Li Kai reveals three major trends in database development | TiDB Hackathon judge interview

Tomorrow is the Hackathon competition day, presumably all the contestants are already gearing up and starting to prepare their own projects.

While waiting for the final competition day, the TiDB community interviewed Li Kai, a specially invited judge of Hackathon, who is currently the head of the database R&D center of the Meituan Basic Technology Department. The team is mainly responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Meituan database, platform, middleware and self-development. The work of the distributed database kernel.

We recorded his understanding and perception of Hackathon through interviews, while discussing the changes that open source has brought to their personal and work, as well as the extremely important advice to contestants. Players who participated in this Hackathon or those who are interested in Hackathon are worth a look.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Li Kai:

Q

Please briefly introduce yourself

Li Kai: Hello everyone, my name is Li Kai. I often use the name Yu Bai when I discuss issues in the technical circle. I have been involved in database analyst and distributed computing work since 2007 and 2008, and it has been more than ten years now. Currently serving as the head of the database R&D center in Meituan, I have been paying attention to the TiDB open source project, and I am also very concerned about the technology of TiDB. I hope to discuss with you more.

Q

What is the attitude of Internet users represented by Meituan towards open source software? What has changed compared to the past?

Li Kai: In fact, many technologies of today's Internet companies are based on open source technologies, including our underlying operating system Linux, and MySQL and TiDB are widely used in databases. From my point of view, our attitude towards open source is very open and very concerned. We look forward to the further development of open source software to support our business development, and we ourselves are making more efforts to contribute to open source.

Q

There are many changes in the database field, and many excellent projects have emerged. As a senior database user, what trends and future opportunities do you think will be in the database field?

Li Kai: From the perspective of these years, I think the first is that the development of new hardware has promoted the transformation of database software. For example, the development of SSD technology around 2010 and the development of higher-speed storage devices such as NVMe and AEP in recent years are all promoting the development of database software;

The second development direction is that with the continuous growth of the amount of data, the original master-slave mode of the stand-alone database has gradually developed into a distributed mode, and the business has higher and higher requirements for its scalability;

The third direction is high availability. With the development of technologies such as Raft, we may only be able to use mainframe technologies in the past. Today, some high-availability technologies are gradually being widely used by many open source software, which has made a great contribution to the continuous availability of our business;

In the future, I think the development of new hardware will bring greater promotion to technology and software, including future memory computing, higher-speed IO devices, and the development of special-purpose chips, which will greatly promote the development of software. In addition, under the current opportunities brought by localization, open source software like TiDB will also have a lot of impact on the market. In the field of analysis and computing, due to the increasing amount of data, the database will face massive computing requirements in the process of moving from a single unit to a distributed one. How to use a combination of software and hardware technologies to solve business needs also needs attention. problem.

Q

TiDB Hackathon is an important event for developers in the TiDB community every year. We know that you are also a judge of TiDB Hackathon 2019. How did you feel when you participated in the TiDB Hackathon as a judge? Which of these projects are the most impressive?

Li Kai: I think Hackathon can actually emerge a lot of creative and technical projects and teams. Let us see that in open source projects like TiDB, a lot of high-level applications can actually be derived to help everyone use it. Good for this project.

In the last Hackathon, I was deeply impressed by a project based on TiDB for stream computing. That project made me think that a distributed database still has very high potential in the field of stream computing or analytical computing, so it brought me a deep impression. impression.

Q

This year, I participated in the TiDB Hackathon again as a senior user and a judge for many years. What suggestions do you have for this year's contestants?

Li Kai: This year, I still look forward to more innovative projects from everyone. On the one hand, it can further tap more potential for TiDB 5.0, which is used by Meituan, on the one hand, and on the other hand, through everyone’s experience in various industries or universities I can contribute some innovative ideas here, so that everyone can use the TiDB database better.

I myself will pay more attention to some projects that improve the core level and have relatively high technical content, as well as some projects with innovative gameplay. These are the two points that I pay more attention to as a jury.

Finally, in this era of great change, I wish you all the best of luck in your career in the new year, and wish you good health and a smooth career!