TiKV is a distributed transactional key-value store designed for horizontal scalability and high availability. It functions as a storage engine that maintains massive datasets across a cluster of physical nodes, ensuring that information remains accessible and consistent even when individual hardware components fail.
The system utilizes a consensus-based replication model to synchronize data across nodes, ensuring that all replicas agree on the order of operations. It manages data distribution through a sharding mechanism that partitions large datasets into smaller groups, each governed by independent consensus instances. To handle concurrent access, the engine employs multi-version concurrency control, allowing for consistent reads without blocking ongoing write operations.
The architecture supports complex distributed transactions by coordinating multi-stage voting processes to ensure that all participating nodes either commit or abort changes together. It maintains data integrity through a storage engine that organizes information into sorted files on disk to optimize performance. The cluster maintains a consistent view of its state and topology through peer-to-peer communication and centralized orchestration.
