Silverlake Axis has a core banking and loan product called SILK, used by most banks in Southeast Asia, like in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. The new product I'm working on, Mobius, is a replacement for SILK, which runs on a mainframe. Mobius uses TiDB, along with Java and other frameworks.
TiDB selections are fast, and it handles collections and solutions well. Vertical and horizontal scaling are also good features.
Additionally, it uses a distributed log and is based on a distributed system, which many customers like. It is also open source and free, which is another major advantage of this product.
While using TiDB Cloud, I noticed things I don't like as a developer. For instance, it doesn't support functions and procedures, which Oracle and other databases do. This means that for table-to-table operations, like data manipulation and functionality, I need to take that data to the application side, process it manually, and then re-insert it.
Oracle and other databases have functions and procedures to handle this within the database itself. This is a key feature that I, as a developer, would like to see in TiDB Cloud.
We are implementing our product for a major bank in Malaysia and setting up a disaster recovery environment. The client requires the ability to replicate auto-increment sequences from the production environment to the disaster recovery environment.
This is not currently possible. We had a call with TiDB, and they said this feature is not available. They advised us to handle the auto-increment indexes from the application side. This means we are doing most things from the application side, which is a challenge we face with TiDB.
I've been using it for one year for a project at a product-based company named Silverlake Axis.
I've never seen downtime with this product. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.
It's scalable. We can scale it both vertically and horizontally. It's very good that way.
I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.
The technical support team is responsive. Whenever we have a query or something related to infrastructure, they come to the meeting and try to resolve our issue.
It's open source.
Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.
Because it is open source, I can recommend it to those who are looking for a cheap product and don't want to invest heavily in a database.
However, if they use TiDB, they need to plan their development so that most of the logic is written on the application side, as TiDB does not support features like functions and procedures. If they are comfortable with that approach, then it's fine.
