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 Serverless is a fully managed, multi-tenant TiDB offering. It delivers an instant, autoscaling MySQL-compatible database and offers a generous free tier and consumption based billing once free limits are exceeded.
Cluster plans
TiDB Serverless offers two service plans to meet different user requirements. Whether you are just getting started or scaling to meet the increasing application demands, these service plans provide the flexibility and capability you need.
Free cluster plan
The free cluster plan is ideal for those who are getting started with TiDB Serverless. It provides developers and small teams with the following essential features:
- No cost: This plan is completely free, with no credit card required to get started.
- Storage: Provides an initial storage capacity of 5 GiB.
- Request Units: Includes 50 million Request Units (RUs) for database operations.
- Easy upgrade: Offers a smooth transition to the scalable cluster plan as your needs grow.
Scalable cluster plan
For applications experiencing growing workloads and needing scalability in real time, the scalable cluster plan provides the flexibility and performance to keep pace with your business growth with the following features:
- Enhanced capabilities: Includes all capabilities of the free cluster plan, along with the capacity to handle larger and more complex workloads, as well as advanced security features.
- Automatic scaling: Automatically adjusts storage and computing resources to efficiently meet changing workload demands.
- Predictable pricing: Although this plan requires a credit card, you are only charged for the resources you use, ensuring cost-effective scalability.
Usage quota
For each organization in TiDB Cloud, you can create a maximum of five free clusters by default. To create more TiDB Serverless clusters, you need to add a credit card and create scalable clusters for the usage.
For the first five TiDB Serverless clusters in your organization, whether they are free or scalable, TiDB Cloud provides a free usage quota for each of them as follows:
- Row-based 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 a cluster reaches its usage quota, it immediately denies any new connection attempts until you increase the quota or the usage is reset upon the start of a new month. Existing connections established before reaching the quota will not be affected. For example, when the storage of a cluster exceeds 5 GiB for a free cluster, the cluster automatically restricts any new connection attempts.
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> -pTo create a database user:
CREATE USER '3pTAoNNegb47Uc8.jeffrey';
To get the prefix for your cluster, take the following steps:
- Navigate to the Clusters page.
- 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.
- In the dialog, get the prefix from the connection string.
TiDB Serverless special terms and conditions
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.