Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

On the day of Tmall's double 11 this year, the OceanBase database refreshed the database processing peak again, reaching 61 million times per second, setting a new world record.

A month earlier, Ant Financial Services Group's distributed relational database OceanBase, which broke the nine-year world record held by Oracle of the United States, became the first Chinese database system to log on to the list, according to TPC, an authoritative body.

As the first distributed relational database applied in the financial core system in the world, the emergence of Ant Financial Services Group OceanBase is a very important step in the development of financial technology.

In fact, the road to the top of Ant Financial Services Group OceanBase is by no means easy, but it is the result of idealism! As Jack Ma said, "I don't know about technology, but I respect it."

Nine years of accumulation in miniature, everything starts from scratch

In 2008, Wang Jian, chief architect of Alibaba Group, proposed "de-IOE", that is, to get rid of the over-reliance of business systems on IBM minicomputers, Oracle databases and EMC storage. Since 2009, Ali Jiuquan has devoted its efforts to the research and development and use of cloud computing, and then launched the OceanBase distributed relational database project under the leadership of Yang Zhenkun.

From Singles Day in 2011 to Singles Day in 2019, the independently developed OceanBase database broke the world record again and again with much lower cost and higher availability than the traditional commercial database, breaking the pattern that the core database has been monopolized by the traditional commercial database for a long time.

In 2017, OceanBase database took the first step of commercialization, providing financial-level distributed relational database services for the "Xinyun +" mutual fund open platform of Nanjing Bank. Since then, OceanBase has not only been put into operation in the production systems of financial institutions such as Xi'an Bank, Guangdong Agricultural Credit, PICC Health Insurance, China Merchants Securities, Suzhou Bank and Changshu Agricultural Commercial Bank, but also exported to India and the United States to provide database services for local payment business.

The past and present life of the database, the road of Ant Financial Services Group's independent research and development.

In the past, in the traditional IT environment represented by IOE, the position of Oracle database is deep-rooted. In 2008, Dr. Wang Jian became the chief architect of Ali Group. Aware of the impact of IOE architecture on Ali's long-term operating costs and its constraints on future business development, he not only put forward the idea of "going to IOE", but also strongly promoted the development of self-developed database OceanBase.

Since Singles' Day in 2009, the amount of data generated and processed every year has been growing explosively. If the Oracle database has been used all the time, the operating cost will be sky-high. On the other hand, the Oracle database designed for the traditional IT environment does not take into account the emerging needs of the Internet, such as large-scale, high concurrency, large capacity and so on. To this end, Alibaba / Ant Financial Services Group began to embark on the road of independent research and development, redesigning a completely independent database product-OceanBase from scratch.

In essence, OceanBase is a relational database like Oracle, but Oracle is a centralized database formed for traditional business scenarios, while OceanBase is a distributed relational database for high concurrency and big data environment. Because of the completely distributed architecture, when OceanBase works, it distributes the original centralized storage and processing data to different machines, and the storage and computing power of the system can be scaled horizontally by adding or decreasing machines, which overcomes the dilemma that the traditional centralized database system can not scale horizontally.

From the first line of code to more than one million lines of code today, supporting the ultra-high peak of double 11 and the full business of Ant Financial Services Group, OceanBase can be said to be an epoch-making database product. As Chen Mengmeng, a senior technical expert of Ant Financial Services Group, said, "at present, only OceanBase is the distributed database that really uses a distributed architecture to solve transactional requirements on a large scale like Ant Financial Services Group."

Distributed database tempered by complex business scenarios! OceanBase who almost "died"

Due to the harsh requirements of database stability, correctness, high availability and high performance, independent research and development of database requires industry background and enterprise practice. this is also one of the reasons why most Chinese enterprises, universities and scientific research institutions are unable to make a breakthrough in database research and development.

Fortunately, OceanBase caught up with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of "weather" and "location". " Timeless "is the concurrent access to the database and the increase of the amount of data brought about by the high concurrency of the Internet at that time, but the inherent centralized system of the traditional database can not have this kind of expansion ability." The "geographical location" is that Alibaba / Ant Financial Services Group has its own huge business and database needs, which not only makes OceanBase have sufficient economic value, but also provides good soil and nutrients for the growth of OceanBase.

In fact, OceanBase research and development has also been "aborted" several times. Because MySQL can meet most of the business needs of Taobao, the OceanBase team will be disbanded, and OceanBase will not be available for several months because of the huge amount of business system changes. All kinds of difficulties were saved because of the strong support of many senior executives such as Wang Jian, Peng Lei, Cheng Li, Liu Zhenfei and so on Alibaba / Ant Financial Services Group.

Take off the pearl in the crown

From the beginning of the project in 2010, it took OceanBase more than 7 years to replace Oracle in Ant Financial Services Group to become Alipay's accounts and other databases, which is a milestone for the entire financial industry.

In 2014, double 11 OceanBase only handled 10% of the transaction data link; in 2015, double 11 handled 100% transaction data link and 50% payment data link; in 2016 double 11, all transaction data link and payment data link as well as 30% payment data link ran on OceanBase; in 2017 double 11, all core systems, including the entire account library, were 100% running on OceanBase. In 2019, double 11 OceanBase once again broke the world record for peak database processing, reaching 61 million times per second.

Different from the traditional centralized database, the fundamental feature of OceanBase is the distributed architecture, which is based on the ordinary PC server to meet the financial level of high reliability and data consistency of the database system. In fact, OceanBase is also called native distributed relational database, which solves all the problems related to high reliability and data consistency at the database kernel level, so that OceanBase really has the commercial database characteristics of high integration, overall delivery, less intrusion to business or even no intrusion. at the same time, it also really overcomes the shortcomings of global consistency and cross-database query that are missing in the hierarchical design of relying solely on sub-database and sub-table.

Through the native distributed database design and PAXOS protocol, OceanBase achieves high availability, strong consistency, ease of use, high performance, scalability and low cost. Previously, a high-end server can easily be hundreds of thousands, millions, while OceanBase only uses a few thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan of PC server. Yang Zhenkun, a senior researcher at Ant Financial Services Group, said, "the performance-to-price ratio of OceanBase has reached 5 ~ 6 times that of the existing commercial database, and will be even higher in the future."

OceanBase enters a new era of commercialization

Since 2017, OceanBase has followed the opening up of Ant Financial Services Group's financial technology and began the practical process of empowering traditional finance. In the same year, OceanBase launched in Nanjing Bank, providing financial-level distributed relational database services for the "Xinyun +" Internet financial open platform of Nanjing Bank, which is a key step for commercial use. Subsequently, Xi'an Bank, Guangdong Agricultural Credit, PICC Health Insurance, China Merchants Securities, Suzhou Bank, Changshu Agricultural Bank and so on also use OceanBase in the production system.

Today, in view of the high-performance transaction processing + large-capacity business intelligence mixed load requirements that enterprises urgently need, OceanBase distributed relational database will give full play to its own advantages of horizontal scalability, further improve and optimize the function and performance of OLTP+OLAP mixed load, and provide services for more businesses.

Want to know more?

Scan the QR code below to follow the live broadcast of the press conference entitled "Technology behind Ant Financial Services Group double 11: peak Insight focusing on New Financial Technology" on November 19.

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