The digital economy is evolving beyond our imagination. According to public data, from 2005 to 2022, the scale of the mainland's digital economy rose from 2.6 trillion yuan to 50.2 trillion yuan, and it is expected to rise to 60 trillion yuan by 2025, accounting for more than 50% of GDP.
By the end of 2022, the data storage volume in mainland China reached 724.5 exabytes, a year-on-year increase of 21.1%, accounting for nearly 1/7 of the world. 1EB can store 1 billion high-definition photos, and such a massive amount of data storage, processing and analysis poses a challenge to the "database", the key foundation of enterprise IT systems.
Financial scenarios with high database security and stability are the biggest training ground for databases. In recent years, the traditional boundaries of the financial industry have been gradually broken, and even the management structure and operation mode of traditional finance have been broken one by one, and the financial industry has entered the fast lane of digital transformation.
As a native distributed database developed in China, OceanBase hopes to help financial institutions overcome the deep waters of digital transformation through self-development and innovation.
Digital Transformation of Financial Institutions Proposes a "Double-Line Upgrade" for Databases
For financial institutions, in addition to the previous offline counter services, there are also more and more new Internet business scenarios: users' daily transfers, electronic payments, mobile banking wealth management, deposit and wealth management, points exchange, and group purchases, all of which put forward new requirements for middle and back-office databases. Among them, in view of the unique advantages of distributed databases in large volume and high concurrency business requirements, domestic distributed databases have ushered in new opportunities.
In November 2020, the People's Bank of China officially released the "Distributed Database Technology Financial Application Specification" (JR/T0204-2020), which builds a complete set of standards for distributed database technology and financial application from three aspects: technical architecture, security technology and disaster recovery, laying the foundation for promoting the implementation of distributed database in the financial industry.
In December last year, the central bank and six ministries and commissions launched a pilot project for the application of financial technology, and the first of the 14 points is to "promote the development and application of safe and reliable financial-grade distributed databases".
The financial industry is related to the "national economy and people's livelihood", and has extremely high requirements for system security and stability.
On the one hand, the financial industry is stable, the fault tolerance rate of the system is very low, and the system upgrade is often "involved in the whole body", and the upgrade process must steadily promote the "soft landing"; on the other hand, since the arrival of the "Internet +" wave in 2013, digital technologies such as Internet finance and mobile finance have followed one after another, and financial institutions have always been actively carrying out digital upgrades, and database upgrades must be synchronized with business upgrades, and even push a business upgrade.
Due to the different infrastructures, the needs and concerns of large and small institutions are different. Due to the perfect infrastructure, large institutions not only pay attention to distribution, but also pay more attention to the complete unitized distributed overall solution and the technical risks of the solution, which has higher requirements for the security and transformation cost of the migration process. In addition, due to the diversity and complexity of infrastructure, such as running on different chips and clouds at the same time, the database is also required to have corresponding compatibility.
Small and medium-sized financial institutions prefer that the upgraded database can operate in the same way as the original database, and also have a greater demand for database services and training to complete the daily maintenance after the upgrade.
Although the financial sector is the market where OceanBase has been deeply involved for the longest time, we are also well aware that the simple superposition of digital technology and traditional industries can no longer meet the needs of increasingly large and complex industries, and database products must keep pace with the times, meet market demand, and continue to innovate.
Domestic databases have experienced the best growth path
As the foundation of the digital economy, the database is the most difficult to bite in the middle layer of the enterprise IT system. Fortunately, in the past 20 years, China's mobile Internet has been unrivaled in the world, and it has also promoted the development and even change of new technologies faster.
As a domestically developed database, OceanBase is completely business-driven.
Alipay hit database bottlenecks earlier than many companies. 2009 was the first year of e-commerce Double 11, and with the exponential growth of transaction volume, the transaction system supporting users' rush to buy was also facing severe challenges, and the performance of the original centralized database peaked. It is not only necessary to cope with traffic peaks and ensure the smooth operation of the system, but also to better serve business development while reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Since its R&D investment in 2010, OceanBase has started to write code from zero, starting from undertaking 10% of the traffic of "Double 11", gradually supporting Alipay's core accounting and payment system, and finally replacing the last Oracle database in Ant Group's core system.
In real-world business scenarios, OceanBase has continuously polished its technical capabilities, topped the "Database World Cup" TPC-C and TPC-H twice, and promoted the establishment of four new standards for distributed databases, achieving innovation in performance, disaster recovery, high availability, and architecture.
In 2020, OceanBase began to be commercialized. Three years ago, we only had 18 customers, and three years later, we have entered thousands of industries and served more than 1,000 customers.
In every industry we enter, OceanBase is becoming the database of choice for core system upgrades. In the financial field, OceanBase is already the largest distributed database in the market, with 70% of banks above designated size with assets of 100 billion yuan, 75% of top securities institutions, 65% of top insurance institutions, and 45% of top fund companies choosing OceanBase for core system upgrades.
From a global point of view, the global database started in the 60s of the 20th century, with the theoretical breakthrough and technological innovation of the relational database in the 80s, the database ushered in the first wave of development boom, and the domestic database started a little later, starting at the end of the 20th century, and ushered in prosperity and development after 2013.
But the latter can also come first. According to the statistics of the Big Data Technology Standards Promotion Committee of the China Communications Standards Association, there are a total of 472 database product providers in the world, of which the United States and China are far ahead in the number of database vendors, accounting for 33.3% and 31.8% respectively, and China's database has become a force to be reckoned with in the global database market.
Taking OceanBase as an example, as a domestic database, we have gone through a special growth path, but it is also the best growth path: in the context of data explosion, we have explored a technical path to adapt to the new digital transformation, and spent 10 years polishing technology and industry applications, accumulating experience, and preparing for the arrival of a more urgent deep water area of digital transformation.
Code control is the greatest confidence for domestic databases to help digitalization
Thirteen years ago, OceanBase had two choices to solve the massive data problem that it had never encountered before: one was based on open source, and the other was completely self-developed.
Open source will start quickly, the threshold will be lower, and the initial capabilities will be more complete. However, when it comes to the deep water area of enterprise needs, if you want to fundamentally solve the problem of distribution, you still need to break the original architecture and completely rewrite it. Because the complexity of distribution cannot be bypassed and will not disappear, it will either be digested by the database or transferred to the business code.
OceanBase chose the path of self-development, and it was difficult at the beginning, but when we completed the cut flow of Alipay's accounting core system, in the popular saying now, it is called "the light boat has crossed the ten thousand mountains".
Since then, our self-developed distributed framework has basically taken shape, and when it encounters more variable requirements and more complex scenarios, OceanBase has developed faster. As the saying goes, "open the road in the mountains and build bridges in the water", our complete control and control of the code is the greatest confidence of OceanBase, and it is also the foundation of accumulation.
It is precisely based on this kind of code control that we are able to boldly explore product models and build our service ecosystem around database products in the demand scenarios of financial institutions, so as to help financial institutions smoothly cross the deep water area of digital transformation.
First of all, we want to let financial customers return to the business itself and make the database as simple as possible, so we have always adhered to the "all-in-one" product strategy, which refers to both the "all-in-one" experience and the 28 principle to solve 80% of the problems.
In practical applications, the database is a means to solve data storage and processing problems, and what the application system really cares about and solves is the business needs, and should not spend too much energy on various problems caused by database upgrades, such as cost complexity, storage differences caused by processing various data structures, advantages and disadvantages brought by different database operation syntax, differences caused by different loads or infrastructure, etc.
"All-in-one" is not a full-featured or simple assembly. In essence, OceanBase is an OLTP database with mission-critical workload support capabilities, and its core capabilities are high availability, high security, high performance, and high cost performance. In most of the data processing scenarios of enterprises, as long as the cost is reasonable, these are necessary capabilities, and we hope to meet 80% of the needs as much as possible on this strong base.
At the same time, OceanBase is also continuously upgrading its service system. Up to now, we have created 340 joint solutions with the most popular 100+ ISVs, of which more than 20 have been copied in large quantities in the industry.
This year, OceanBase's technical service partners have increased by 100%, and the number of professional service ecosystem delivery personnel has increased by 151%, and there is now a team of 100 people to help us serve customers together.
In order to quickly cultivate partners, OceanBase has also made efforts to cultivate and certify business talents. Today, the certification training system has been upgraded to version 3.0, and it has been launched in English, and nearly 30,000 people have passed the certification.
In the course of OceanBase's ten years of sharpening a sword, we have summarized a formula: scenario ✖️ capital ✖️ time = core technology, and this irreproducible growth path has given us such a historical opportunity and helped us precipitate our core competitiveness.
In the process of commercialization and productization, we have also summarized a formula: (self-research + innovation + openness) ✖️ long-termism = accumulation and development, across the deep water area. Self-research and innovation are essentially together, the foundation behind innovation is self-research, only by mastering all the core code, knowing what it is, knowing why it is true, only being open enough, continuing to cultivate the ecology, and only continuing to invest long enough time can we form a trend of accumulation, cross the deep water area, and truly pass through the cycle.
The author of this article: Yang Bing, CEO of OceanBaseSource: PartnerEmail: [email protected]