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TiDB looks promising, but it doesn't have serializable transactions at all, which makes it something of an apples-to-oranges comparison at the moment when it comes to OLTP.

TiDB has a weird kind of variation on "read committed" where you get phantom reads (though they're not called that in the documentation, which is actually ambiguous on this point). This is a problem for apps that expect consistency.

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Siddon Tang from TiDB here. Thanks for your interest in TiDB! TiDB uses Snapshot Isolation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation), which is similar to Repeated Read in MySQL. It doesn’t allow Read Phantom but can’t avoid Write Skew. IMO, this can work well for OLTP in most of the cases. If you really care about serializability, you can use `select for update` to promote the Read as Write explicitly like other databases do.

TiDB supports READ COMMITTED isolation which is not the same as MySQL, but it is just designed for some special cases for TiDB itself and it is not recommended for external users.

Thanks, that's helpful!

The documentation states that phantom reads are not possible (under the default isolation level or repeatable read): https://github.com/pingcap/docs/blob/master/sql/transaction-...

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