Max Liu follows a long-established software industry credo: make it work, make it right, and make it fast. The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PingCAP, Liu’s goal is nothing less than “to become the best and most respected infrastructure company in the world.”
Liu’s company chases this goal on the strength of TiDB, its flagship product, an open-source NewSQL database that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing workloads. TiDB was meticulously designed by Liu and his team, which developed it around several principles, the first of which is to “always stay close to our users.” That core principle helped in TiDB’s early days, when it was released to the open-source community, which helped with refinements.
Liu has remained dedicated to this principle as PingCAP has grown and evolved. If you ask him, in fact, the constant evolution of the product is its key differentiating factor. He realized early on that trial and error would lead him, and TiDB, to where they wanted to go. “A database like that wouldn’t be built by a handful of engineers behind closed doors,” he said in a 2021 interview. “If you ask me, a great database is never designed beforehand. It is formed, evolved, constantly improved, and battle-tested through innumerable real-world use cases in a consistent, long-term effort.”
Those long-term efforts have paid off, and, naturally, they continue. In April, PingCAP announced a suite of updates that included an AI-ready SQL and expanded its cloud flexibility by integrating Microsoft Azure alongside Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. For Liu, bagging another tech giant was proof of concept. “No matter how large you are, who your customers are or where you operate,” he said. “TiDB has a solution that can handle any size workload — now and in the future.”
But Liu wasn’t done; eventually, if world domination is your goal, you have to throw down the gauntlet. And so he did. “There’s no point running one database for AI, another for business analytics, another for transactions,” he said. “That’s just adding needless complexity and expense. TiDB can do it all. And it can do it better, at lower cost.”