Get start with TiDB - Setup a sandbox in 5 minutes

To answer the question that what is TiDB, we briefly talked about NewSQL. So, the minimum expectation for a NewSQL database would be, it should run SQL. And the best way for (a person who always try to at least think as) a developer, I decided to give it a run~

Here is my reference for this tutorial.

Here are my questions when going through the tutorial so I think we’d better cover the concepts before diving in.

• What is TiUP? TiUP is a tool for us to quickly and easily setup TiDB. It is something new since TiDB 4.0 and without it, I am not able to setup a TiDB within 10 minutes.
• What is TiUP Playground? So, that’s a sandbox environment we can easily deploy and free to mess up with~ In the first couple of tutorials, this will be the environment we go with.
• What are KVs, DBs, and PDs? We can temporarily ignore those terms for now. It is related to the architecture of TiDB and I will explain more when we come to understand the “distributed database” part.

Now it is Phoebe putting on her instructional design hat：

1. Instruction said it currently does not support the Apple M1 chip. I Checked my Mac Overview info. I am using an Intel Chip. So I am good to go.
2. Install curl command if needed and follow this tutorial.

3. Download and install TiUP:

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://tiup-mirrors.pingcap.com/install.sh | sh

4. Declare the global environment variable:

   source ~/.profile

5. Start the cluster in the current session:

   tiup playground v5.0.2 --db 2 --pd 3 --kv 3 --monitor

6. Verify that you can see the cluster start successfully message.

7. Install mysql using Brew:

   Brew install mysql

8. Connect to mysql client

   mysql --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4000 -u root

Now we are good to go! In the next blog, we will explore the database and do some SQL fun.