TiDB Monthly Product Update — October 2026

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Here's what's new across TiDB and TiDB Cloud in October 2026.

At a glance

• TiDB Cloud
  • PostgreSQL-compatible TiDB Cloud Starter, TiDB Cloud BYOC, and TiDB Cloud Filesystem entered Public Preview.
  • Elastic Mode simplifies capacity management for Essential and Premium, while Essential adds manual backups that remain available until you delete them.
  • Essential and Premium add a New Relic metrics integration in Public Preview, and newly created Dedicated clusters now disable public endpoints by default.
• Developer experience
  • Expanded llms.txt indexes make documentation for all active TiDB products discoverable in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.
  • New resources explain persistent memory for AI agents, the role of open source when agents write code, and the data architecture behind memory-intensive AI systems.
• Coming next
  • TiDB Cloud Premium is scheduled to reach general availability in November 2026.
  • The core code of TiDB X is planned to be open-sourced by the end of 2026.

TiDB Cloud

October brings three new TiDB Cloud product launches, all in Public Preview: PostgreSQL-compatible Starter, BYOC, and Filesystem.

📌 New product launch: PostgreSQL-compatible TiDB Cloud Starter

Available on: TiDB Cloud Starter on AWS

Status: Public Preview

Developers can now choose PostgreSQL compatibility when creating a TiDB Cloud Starter instance. The preview includes instance management, monitoring, backup and restore, pgvector-compatible vector search, and selected PostgreSQL extensions, providing a path to distributed SQL for applications that use PostgreSQL tools and drivers.

PostgreSQL-compatible Starter is intended for development and evaluation, not production workloads. During the preview, an organization can create up to 10 free PostgreSQL-compatible Starter instances.

Get started · Release notes

📌 New product launch: TiDB Cloud BYOC

Available on: TiDB Cloud BYOC on AWS

Status: Public Preview

TiDB Cloud BYOC runs the database data plane in your AWS account and VPC while PingCAP operates the TiDB Cloud control plane. This model gives organizations control over networking, IAM policies, and where production data resides without taking on day-to-day database operations.

Joining the preview requires onboarding coordination with PingCAP. To start BYOC onboarding, contact Sales.

BYOC overview · Announcement · Release notes

📌 New product launch: TiDB Cloud Filesystem

Available on: TiDB Cloud Filesystem

Status: Public Preview

TiDB Cloud Filesystem provides Git-aware persistent workspaces for AI coding agents. A workspace remains available when a sandbox, CI job, or other runtime ends, allowing a later runtime to reuse synced files and repository state instead of rebuilding the workspace from scratch.

Docs: Quick start via console or CLI | Release notes

Let Essential and Premium manage elastic capacity

Available on: TiDB Cloud Essential and TiDB Cloud Premium

For TiDB Cloud Essential instances on CLOUD.202603.x or later and TiDB Cloud Premium instances, you can now use Elastic Mode without a configured Max RCU. TiDB Cloud automatically allocates capacity according to demand, and new instances use this behavior by default. Existing instances keep their current Max RCU setting unless you clear it.

Premium users can still configure Baseline RCU as the minimum provisioned and billable capacity. Essential users with workloads that sustain more than 100,000 RCUs should consider Premium. Essential also adds manual backups that are retained until explicitly deleted.

Docs: Essential capacity · Premium capacity · Essential backups | Release notes

Send Essential and Premium metrics to New Relic

Available on: TiDB Cloud Essential and TiDB Cloud Premium

Status: Public Preview

The New Relic integration sends key TiDB Cloud metrics to New Relic, letting teams monitor database health alongside the rest of their application and infrastructure telemetry.

Docs: Essential setup · Premium setup | Release notes

Quick updates

TiDB Cloud

• Dedicated — Newly created clusters have public endpoints disabled by default. Existing clusters retain their current setting; to connect a new cluster over the public internet, explicitly enable a public endpoint and configure an IP access list. Learn more · Release notes
• BYOC — Built-in vCPU limit alerts notify you when usage approaches an AWS regional limit or when the limit blocks a scale-up operation. Built-in alerting · Release notes
• Starter — Chat2Query is no longer available in SQL Editor and Data Service. Other SQL Editor and Data Service features are unchanged. Release notes

Developer resources

Help AI tools discover TiDB documentation with expanded llms.txt coverage

TiDB documentation expanded its machine-readable llms.txt coverage so AI assistants and other LLM-based tools can more easily discover current product documentation. The central overview pages now index all active products in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.

New product-specific indexes are available for:

• PostgreSQL-compatible TiDB Cloud Starter — English · Simplified Chinese · Japanese
• TiDB Cloud BYOC — English · Simplified Chinese · Japanese
• TiDB Cloud Filesystem — English · Simplified Chinese · Japanese
• TiDB Cloud Lake — English · Simplified Chinese · Japanese

More developer resources

• TiDB SCaiLE 2026 took place on October 15 in Mountain View, CA. Check out product announcements and #SCaiLE2026 on X to learn more. (LinkedIn)
• Persistent AI Agent Memory Explained compares short-term context, long-term memory, and persistent workspace state, and explains how those layers help agents continue work across sessions.
• Why Open Source Still Matters When Agents Write the Code examines why inspectability, portability, and community governance still matter when AI agents generate and maintain software.
• AI Hardware Data Architecture: What Breaks at Scale explores the data-architecture demands created by memory-intensive AI devices and services.

Coming up next

Planned

• TiDB Cloud Premium general availability — PingCAP announced that TiDB Cloud Premium is planned to become generally available in November 2026. Announcement
• TiDB X open source — PingCAP plans to open source the core code of TiDB X, the architecture behind TiDB Cloud, by the end of 2026. Announcement

Learn more

• TiDB Cloud release notes
• TiDB release notes · TiDB Operator release notes
• TiCDC releases · TiUP releases · TiProxy releases
• TiDB Cloud documentation · TiDB documentation
• Follow TiDB product news and technical content on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

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