Select Your Cluster Tier

The cluster tier determines the throughput and performance of your cluster.

TiDB Cloud provides the following two options of cluster tiers. Before creating a cluster, you need to consider which option suits your need better.

• TiDB Serverless
• TiDB Dedicated

TiDB Serverless (Beta)

TiDB Serverless (previously called Developer Tier) is a fully managed service of TiDB. It's still in beta and should not be used in production. However, you can use TiDB Serverless clusters for non-production workloads such as prototype applications, hackathons, academic courses, or to provide a temporary data service for your datasets.

Usage quota

For each organization in TiDB Cloud, you can create a maximum of five TiDB Serverless clusters by default. To create more TiDB Serverless clusters, you need to add a credit card and set a spend limit for the usage.

For the first five TiDB Serverless clusters in your organization, TiDB Cloud provides a free usage quota for each of them as follows:

• Row storage: 5 GiB
• Request Units (RUs): 50 million RUs per month

A Request Unit (RU) is a unit of measure used to represent the amount of resources consumed by a single request to the database. The amount of RUs consumed by a request depends on various factors, such as the operation type or the amount of data being retrieved or modified.

Once the free quota of a cluster is reached, the read and write operations on this cluster will be throttled until you increase the quota or the usage is reset upon the start of a new month. For example, when the storage of a cluster exceeds 5 GiB, the maximum size limit of a single transaction is reduced from 10 MiB to 1 MiB.

To learn more about the RU consumption of different resources (including read, write, SQL CPU, and network egress), the pricing details, and the throttled information, see TiDB Serverless Pricing Details.

User name prefix

For each TiDB Serverless cluster, TiDB Cloud generates a unique prefix to distinguish it from other clusters.

Whenever you use or set a database user name, you must include the prefix in the user name. For example, assume that the prefix of your cluster is 3pTAoNNegb47Uc8.

• To connect to your cluster:

  mysql -u '3pTAoNNegb47Uc8.root' -h <host> -P 4000 -D test --ssl-mode=VERIFY_IDENTITY --ssl-ca=<CA_root_path> -p
  

  Note

  TiDB Serverless requires TLS connection. To find the CA root path on your system, see Root certificate default path.

• To create a database user:

  CREATE USER '3pTAoNNegb47Uc8.jeffrey';
  

To get the prefix for your cluster, take the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Clusters page.
2. Click the name of your target cluster to go to its overview page, and then click Connect in the upper-right corner. A connection dialog is displayed.
3. In the dialog, get the prefix from the connection string.

TiDB Serverless special terms and conditions

• TiDB Serverless is currently in beta and does not have uptime SLA guarantee during beta phase. If you use TiDB Serverless beta to store a commercial or production dataset, any potential risk associated with the use should be taken on your own, and PingCAP shall not be liable for any damage.
• Some of TiDB Cloud features are partially supported or not supported on TiDB Serverless. See TiDB Serverless Limitations for details.

TiDB Dedicated

TiDB Dedicated is for production use with the benefits of cross-zone high availability, horizontal scaling, and HTAP.

For TiDB Dedicated clusters, you can customize the cluster size of TiDB, TiKV, and TiFlash easily according to your business need. For each TiKV node and TiFlash node, the data on the node is replicated and distributed in different availability zones for high availability.

To create a TiDB Dedicated cluster, you need to add a payment method or apply for a Proof of Concept (PoC) trial.