I’m a Principal Solutions Engineer at TiDB, where I help enterprises design scalable, cost-efficient database architectures. I’ve worked closely with engineering teams at many multi-billion-dollar companies to architect distributed data solutions that power mission-critical, high-scale workloads. My access to internal systems across organizations of all sizes has given me rare, firsthand insight into how databases actually behave in real-world environments—how they scale, where they break, and what strategies lead to long-term success.