TiDB

Overview

TiDB (/’taɪdiːbi:/, "Ti" stands for Titanium) is an open-source, distributed, NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability. TiDB can be deployed on-premise or in-cloud.

The TiDB source supports both Full Refresh and Incremental syncs. You can choose if this connector will copy only the new or updated data, or all rows in the tables and columns you set up for replication, every time a sync is run.

Resulting schema

The TiDB source does not alter the schema present in your database. Depending on the destination connected to this source, however, the schema may be altered. See the destination's documentation for more details.

Features

Feature	Supported	Notes
Full Refresh Sync	Yes
Incremental - Append Sync	Yes
Replicate Incremental Deletes	Yes
Change Data Capture	No
SSL Support	Yes
SSH Tunnel Connection	Yes

Getting started

Requirements

1. TiDB v4.0 or above
2. Allow connections from Airbyte to your TiDB database (if they exist in separate VPCs)
3. (Optional) Create a dedicated read-only Airbyte user with access to all tables needed for replication

Note: When connecting to TiDB Cloud with TLS enabled, you need to specify TLS protocol, such as enabledTLSProtocols=TLSv1.2 or enabledTLSProtocols=TLSv1.3 in the JDBC parameters.

Setup guide

1. Make sure your database is accessible from the machine running Airbyte

This is dependent on your networking setup. The easiest way to verify if Airbyte is able to connect to your TiDB instance is via the check connection tool in the UI.

2. Create a dedicated read-only user with access to the relevant tables (Recommended but optional)

This step is optional but highly recommended to allow for better permission control and auditing. Alternatively, you can use Airbyte with an existing user in your database.

To create a dedicated database user, run the following commands against your database:

CREATE USER 'airbyte'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password_here';

Then give it access to the relevant database:

GRANT SELECT ON <database name>.* TO 'airbyte'@'%';

3. That's it!

Your database user should now be ready for use with Airbyte.

Connection via SSH Tunnel

Airbyte has the ability to connect to a TiDB instance via an SSH Tunnel. The reason you might want to do this because it is not possible (or against security policy) to connect to the database directly (e.g. it does not have a public IP address).

When using an SSH tunnel, you are configuring Airbyte to connect to an intermediate server (a.k.a. a bastion sever) that does have direct access to the database. Airbyte connects to the bastion and then asks the bastion to connect directly to the server.

Using this feature requires additional configuration, when creating the source. We will talk through what each piece of configuration means.

1. Configure all fields for the source as you normally would, except SSH Tunnel Method.
2. SSH Tunnel Method defaults to No Tunnel (meaning a direct connection). If you want to use an SSH Tunnel choose SSH Key Authentication or Password Authentication.
   1. Choose Key Authentication if you will be using an RSA private key as your secret for establishing the SSH Tunnel (see below for more information on generating this key).
   2. Choose Password Authentication if you will be using a password as your secret for establishing the SSH Tunnel.
3. SSH Tunnel Jump Server Host refers to the intermediate (bastion) server that Airbyte will connect to. This should be a hostname or an IP Address.
4. SSH Connection Port is the port on the bastion server with which to make the SSH connection. The default port for SSH connections is 22, so unless you have explicitly changed something, go with the default.
5. SSH Login Username is the username that Airbyte should use when connection to the bastion server. This is NOT the TiDB username.
6. If you are using Password Authentication, then SSH Login Username should be set to the password of the User from the previous step. If you are using SSH Key Authentication TiDB password, but the password for the OS-user that Airbyte is using to perform commands on the bastion.
7. If you are using SSH Key Authentication, then SSH Private Key should be set to the RSA Private Key that you are using to create the SSH connection. This should be the full contents of the key file starting with -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- and ending with -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----.

Data type mapping

TiDB data types are mapped to the following data types when synchronizing data:

TiDB Type	Resulting Type	Notes
bit(1)	boolean
bit(>1)	base64 binary string
boolean	boolean
tinyint(1)	boolean
tinyint	number
smallint	number
mediumint	number
int	number
bigint	number
float	number
double	number
decimal	number
binary	base64 binary string
blob	base64 binary string
date	string	ISO 8601 date string. ZERO-DATE value will be converted to NULL. If column is mandatory, convert to EPOCH.
datetime, timestamp	string	ISO 8601 datetime string. ZERO-DATE value will be converted to NULL. If column is mandatory, convert to EPOCH.
time	string	ISO 8601 time string. Values are in range between 00:00:00 and 23:59:59.
year	year string	Doc
char, varchar with non-binary charset	string
char, varchar with binary charset	base64 binary string
tinyblob	base64 binary string
blob	base64 binary string
mediumblob	base64 binary string
longblob	base64 binary string
binary	base64 binary string
varbinary	base64 binary string
tinytext	string
text	string
mediumtext	string
longtext	string
json	serialized json string	E.g. {"a": 10, "b": 15}
enum	string
set	string	E.g. blue,green,yellow

Note: arrays for all the above types as well as custom types are supported, although they may be de-nested depending on the destination.

External resources

Now that you have set up the TiDB source connector, check out the following TiDB tutorial:

• Using Airbyte to Migrate Data from TiDB Cloud to Snowflake

Changelog

Version	Date	Pull Request	Subject
0.2.5	2023-06-20	27212	Fix silent exception swallowing in StreamingJdbcDatabase
0.2.4	2023-03-22	20760	Removed redundant date-time datatypes formatting
0.2.3	2023-03-06	23455	For network isolation, source connector accepts a list of hosts it is allowed to connect to
0.2.2	2022-12-14	20436	Consolidate date/time values mapping for JDBC sources
	2022-10-13	15535	Update incremental query to avoid data missing when new data is inserted at the same time as a sync starts under non-CDC incremental mode
0.2.1	2022-09-01	16238	Emit state messages more frequently
0.2.0	2022-07-26	14362	Integral columns are now discovered as int64 fields.
0.1.5	2022-07-25	14996	Removed additionalProperties:false from spec
0.1.4	2022-07-22	14714	Clarified error message when invalid cursor column selected
0.1.3	2022-07-04	14243	Update JDBC string builder
0.1.2	2022-06-17	13864	Updated stacktrace format for any trace message errors
0.1.1	2022-04-29	12480	Query tables with adaptive fetch size to optimize JDBC memory consumption
0.1.0	2022-04-19	11283	Initial Release