Introduction
As the cryptocurrency market evolves, Web3 technology has ushered in a new era of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and financial services prioritizing transparency and user autonomy. Centralized exchanges remain vital, offering liquidity and accessibility. However, they face immense technical challenges:
- Handling millions of transactions per second
- Ensuring high availability
- Maintaining global data integrity
TiDB, an open-source distributed SQL database, addresses these challenges with:
- Horizontal scalability
- ACID-compliant transactions
- High availability
Workload Characteristics
Core Demands of Exchange Databases
- Write-Intensive Operations: 95% of orders involve inserts/updates from market makers.
- Real-Time Performance: Millisecond-level response times for order matching.
- High Concurrency: Peak writes exceed 250,000 ops/sec for top exchanges.
- Data Immutability: Filled orders require irreversible audit trails.
Technical Strategies:
- In-memory databases for low-latency access
- Database partitioning and sharding
- Asynchronous write isolation
Three Key Database Scenarios
1. Historical Archive Order Database
- Stores cold data (3+ month-old orders)
- Uses Amazon RDS with sharding
- Optimized for cost-efficient retrieval
2. Read-Only Order Database
- Real-time sync via Change Data Capture (CDC)
- Enables unified queries without manual data merging
- Eliminates cross-database consistency issues
3. Final Order Database (Exchange 2.0)
- Full-memory processing reduces latency
- Asynchronous settlement via ordered message queues
- Persists data post-trade matching
Technical Requirements
| Requirement | Specification |
|---|---|
| Write Throughput | >100,000 ops/sec |
| Read Latency | <3ms for hot data |
| Data Retention | 1-year queryable history |
| Availability | 99.99% uptime |
Architecture Challenges
Pain Points
- Business Continuity: 24/7 global trading tolerates zero downtime
- Complexity: Legacy sharding increases maintenance overhead
- Cost: Cloud expenses exceeding $450K/month for some exchanges
TiDB Solutions:
- Online DDL modifications
- Three-AZ deployment for fault tolerance
- Linear storage scaling
Competitive Analysis
| Database | Scalability | ACID Support | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| TiDB | ✅ Horizontal | ✅ Full | <10ms |
| HBase | ✅ Vertical | ❌ Single-row | <3ms |
| ES | ✅ Horizontal | ❌ Document | <1ms |
FAQ Section
Q: How does TiDB handle high-frequency cancel orders?
A: Through async message queues that serialize operations while avoiding row-level locks.
Q: Can TiDB replace Elasticsearch for order queries?
A: Yes, for complex SQL queries, though ES still outperforms for full-text search.
Q: What's the cost reduction potential?
A: Converged architectures can lower hardware costs by 30-50% versus sharded solutions.
👉 Start your free trial to test TiDB's exchange-ready features today.