Disclaimer: PingCAPer here.
Thanks for your attention to PingCAP and TiDB. It’s true that we are on HN front page for many times - that’s incredible recognition for the value of our technical content, and we are humbled and thankful. We take great pride in our work, and have always committed to valuable, accurate and insightful content.
As for referring our PVLDB as “the first industry paper”, thanks @karsinkk for pointing out. We admit that the original description was inaccurate and just updated it to be “This is the first paper in the industry to describe the Raft-based implementation of a distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database.”
However, we have never claimed ourselves as “the best, the fastest.” If you find such occurrences and think they are inaccurate, please do share with us and we will correct the same ASAP. As pointed in https://pingcap.com/blog/9-why's-to-ask-when-evaluating-a-di..., “There's no single technology that can be the elixir to all your problems. The database realm is no different. If your data can fit on a single MySQL instance without too much pressure on your server, or if your performance requirement for complex queries isn't high, then a distributed database may not be a good choice. Choosing to use a distributed database typically means additional maintenance cost, which may not be worthwhile for small workloads. “
Regarding your comparison between TiDB and MySQL, there are differences between MySQL and TiDB as stated here: https://opensource.com/article/18/11/key-differences-between.... If you are still interested in trying out TiDB with your real life workload, we are very happy to help you. Please reach out to us in our community Slack: https://slack.tidb.io/invite?team=tidb-community&channel=eve...