Why Pinterest Moved from HBase to TiDB: Zero-Downtime Migration & 5-9s Availability

Big companies do not switch databases unless something is broken. At AWS re: Invent I spoke to Max Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of TiDB, powered by PingCAP, and Bo Liu, Head of Online Infrastructure at Pinterest, to talk about why teams like Pinterest are moving core systems back to SQL with TiDB.

This was a deep, honest conversation about scale, reliability, and where databases are headed next.

We covered:

- Why Pinterest finally hit a wall with NoSQL after years on HBase

- What really breaks first at massive scale: consistency, operations, or developer velocity

- How Pinterest migrated critical graph systems to TiDB with no downtime and five nines consistency

- The tension CIOs face between rock-solid stability and fast-moving AI teams

- Whether embeddings and AI workloads should live inside the same database as transactions

- How agentic workloads are changing what enterprises expect from a database

This was not about hype. It was about real systems, real migrations, and real trade-offs.

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