Applications

Four binaries are built from this repository. Three are companion tools that ship as part of the TiDB ecosystem.

Binary	Source	Purpose
tidb-server	cmd/tidb-server/	The SQL frontend daemon. The bulk of this wiki is about its internals.
br	br/	Backup & Restore for TiDB clusters.
tidb-lightning, tidb-lightning-ctl	lightning/ (CLI), pkg/lightning/ (lib)	High-throughput data importer.
dumpling	dumpling/	Logical SQL/CSV exporter (mysqldump replacement).

Other deliverables that build from this repo:

• A handful of test/dev binaries under cmd/ (benchdb, benchkv, benchraw, ddltest, importer, mirror, pluginpkg).
• Tooling under tools/ (tools/check, tools/dashboard-linter, tools/tazel, tools/patch-go).

Per-application pages

• TiDB server — the SQL frontend.
• BR — backup & restore.
• Lightning — bulk data import.
• Dumpling — logical data export.

All three companion tools are first-class citizens in this monorepo: they share infrastructure with the server (parser, KV client, table codec, schema model), and their builds are exposed via top-level make targets (make build_br, make build_lightning, make build_dumpling).