As the earliest domestic database manufacturer, Renmin University Jincang has experienced the process of China's database industry from dormant energy storage to rapid development, and its development practice represents the industrialization of domestic databases to a certain extent. In 2020, the number of sales sets in the key application areas of the domestic database accounted for the first, more than 20 years of technical accumulation and operational achievements have been affirmed at the market level, however, the lack of core technology in the industry, the pain point of weak industrial ecology still exists, in the face of the broad market prospects in the future, how to ensure high-quality and sustainable development of domestic databases? Recently, Song Rui, senior vice president of The Golden Warehouse of the National People's Congress, shared the "Road of Domestic Database Practitioners" on the series of interviews with domestic network security celebrities - "My Road to Cyber Security and Me".
The road of domestic database practitioners
Song Rui, senior vice president of Renmin University Jincang, professor-level senior engineer, software designer, system integration project management engineer, system analyst, senior project manager, PMP. He graduated from Peking University majoring in software engineering and has published many papers in core journals at home and abroad. He has conducted in-depth research in the fields of databases, cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, etc., and has undertaken the design, research and development management of major projects and large-scale information systems in many countries.
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Song Rui, a practitioner of domestic databases: Domestic databases have initially got rid of the confinement of the "four mountains" and entered a stage of rapid development; accelerating ecological construction and building a healthy ecological environment for localized products is a top priority; the hard-core capabilities of domestic databases need to be improved; new functions and advantages need to be used to achieve lane change and overtaking; product development needs to meet business needs; databases should be combined with upstream and downstream products of the industrial chain to form an overall security defense system; while embracing open source, they should also actively give back to the open source community.
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· 01 Move away four mountains and start a new journey of domestic database development
· 02 Building a localized product ecology is a top priority
· 03 Hardcore capabilities are the way to break the game
· 04 Product differentiation is the way to break through
· 05 The application of new technologies is the source of development
· 06 Meeting business needs is the foundation of survival
· 07 Improving security capabilities is the key to stability
· 08 Embracing open source is the only way to go
· 09 Refactoring the basic framework is the hope of the gold warehouse
01 Move away four mountains and start a new journey of domestic database development
The domestic database started late, and only industrialization was truly realized at the end of the 90s, which is nearly 20 years away from the development history of foreign industries, coupled with the early domestic system architecture dominated by foreign products, which restricted the scope of use of domestic database products. Domestic manufacturers have been surviving in the cracks in the past, but also facing the oppression of four mountains: one is the mountain of technology, the database as a high-tech threshold industry, domestic manufacturers are facing problems in technological development at the beginning of their establishment; the second is the snow mountain of financing, the development of enterprises can not be separated from the input of funds, financing difficulties make business development become difficult; the third is the volcano of competition, domestic manufacturers not only from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL and other foreign old databases to win market share, but also to face increasingly fierce domestic competition; the fourth is the iceberg of the market, from the perspective of industrial development, our market space is relatively narrow, the recognition of domestic databases by market customers needs to be improved, the current users rely more on foreign Wintel system and IOE architecture, the application environment of domestic products is relatively bad.
With the development of nuclear high-tech projects, the state has increased its support for domestic basic software, and the localization of IT architecture has accelerated in the past two years, giving domestic database manufacturers a lot of market space and effectively solving the problems of the database industry in the capital and market. At present, the domestic database industry is ushering in a period of opportunity, we are constantly getting bigger and stronger, from the original learning and running, to the local and running, the future will achieve comprehensive and running and even leading. At present, the domestic database has initially got rid of the "four mountains" of the confinement, into the stage of rapid development, related products have begun to emerge, in some performance indicators have surpassed foreign competitors, but in the realization of a comprehensive lead still have to go through a longer development process, but also need a better ecological environment of supporting construction.
02 Building a localized product ecology is a top priority
Relatively weak ecological construction is the domestic database and even the entire domestic software and hardware industry is facing the problem, foreign database products in the past 20 years for a long time to occupy the main share of the domestic market, the domestic standard system specifications are mostly around foreign products to develop, the disadvantages in the ecological environment to widen the gap between domestic products and foreign competitors, so in order to achieve the database industry to catch up, accelerate ecological construction, build a healthy localized product ecological environment is a top priority.
The ecological construction of the database can be divided into the following requirements according to the system level: First, to achieve the adaptation of products in the whole industry, especially the formulation of standards and specifications, and the targeted adaptation of different business systems, it is necessary for domestic manufacturers to work together to form a joint force to jointly build a product-level linkage ecology, and to use POC testing and other means to ensure the stability of function and performance. Secondly, we should actively cultivate the user ecology, the current domestic database practitioners are relatively small, and application developers are more for the development of foreign databases, the familiarity with domestic databases needs to be improved, and domestic manufacturers still need to work product supporting development training. At the same time, manufacturers should also actively cooperate with universities to cultivate the next generation of database practitioners and establish a training certification system. Finally, and most critically, to improve the database research and development ecology, domestic personnel engaged in database technology research and development is scarce, lack of research on the core code, has not yet formed a mature research and development ecology, and the small number of papers published in the world also reflects this problem.
03 Hardcore capabilities are the way to break the game
In addition to ecological construction, the hard-core capability of database products themselves is a key factor affecting the development of the industry. Nowadays, users still have dependence on foreign database products, and the enthusiasm for using domestic products is not high, and the fundamental reason is that there is a gap in product capabilities. Iron also needs to be hard, domestic products in the function, performance, stability, safety to fully reach or even ahead of the international level, still need to go through a long-term catch-up process, although the initial results, but from the market point of view we still have a lot of need to catch up in product application and technology integration.
04 Product differentiation is the way to break through
Promoting domestic database products in the database industry with a mature system requires new functions and advantages to find another way. With the continuous enrichment of application scenarios and the increase of business requirements, the variety of database products is also increasing, from relational databases to non-relational databases, centralized transactional databases to analytical databases, real-time databases used in industrial production, distributed databases in the financial field, graph databases used in professional fields, and in-memory databases that are used in scenarios with particularly high real-time data access requirements. The huge differences in application scenarios make a database usually unable to be applied to all business systems, and in the future, database products will evolve more types to provide more targeted solutions for the processing of structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data. At the same time, with the deep integration of cloud computing technology and business, the cloud architecture of user business systems is also different. There is room for improvement in the database industry's future cloud capabilities and support for multi-cloud structures. In terms of product differentiation and cloud business support, we can achieve lane change and overtaking, which is also an opportunity and challenge for domestic databases in the future. At present, we have made breakthroughs in the application of some new types of databases and achieved a surpassing lead in foreign products.
05 The application of new technologies is the source of development
The differentiated development of products is inseparable from the blessing of new technologies, and the combination of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and distribution with databases has become a hot spot for manufacturers' research and development. The use of new technologies can bring efficiency and economic advantages to specific projects. The database products of Dajincang have begun to apply artificial intelligence technology in terms of fault diagnosis and processing, data migration, etc., and explore the use of various forms of enhanced analysis, such as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to achieve concurrent analysis and transaction processing in transactions or processes. In-memory computing (IMC) technology is a key enabler of enhanced trading. In addition to enhancing cost-based query optimization, AI and ML are used to automate many of the current manual management operations, including configuration management, auto scaling, storage, indexing and partitioning, and database tuning. Based on existing usage data, AI and ML are applied to adjust operations and optimize configurations to improve security and performance. By building various algorithms into the bottom layer of the database, the processing pressure on the application side is greatly reduced, the intelligence level of the database is improved, and the user is brought a more concise and rapid experience.
The development of technology is cyclical, and new technologies from formation to widespread deployment and application usually go through a period of technological triggering, a period of expectation expansion, a period of bubble disillusionment, and finally a period of peak productivity through the period of enlightenment climbing. Mature technology requires a lot of application experience accumulation, new technology is the foundation to support the development of the database industry, but also to cope with the current business needs of the increasingly complex basic guarantee, so the database industry only through long-term technology accumulation, in order to produce more high-quality products. In the future, the new and old technologies of the database industry will learn from each other and continue to integrate, and the boundaries of the technical level will become more and more blurred, and the application of new technologies must start from actual needs in order to obtain rapid development and accumulation.
06 Meeting business needs is the foundation of survival
The demand side and the industrial side are mutually promoted, and the emergence of new functions and new technologies on the industrial side will lose their actual value if they are not accepted by users. Product development is the most taboo to entertain yourself, according to the user's business needs to develop products to obtain market recognition. Renmin University Golden Warehouse is very concerned about the voice of the demand side, pay attention to the problems faced by users in business development, we are not limited to solving existing problems and legacy problems for users, but also on the existing system, the system to be built, the transformation system and even the new system of the four types of systems to do comprehensive analysis and judgment, to provide users with products and solutions that are highly compatible with the business, to help solve the bottlenecks and problems that may be faced in the future business development process.
As a general-purpose basic software with high user transparency, the database needs to be combined with the business attributes of different industries. For example, gis space-time data in the geographic information industry contains time information and spatial information, with a separate storage style, general-purpose data in the GIS data access support and efficiency defects, by adjusting the algorithm and implementation to optimize the storage and query of heterogeneous data, in order to ensure the quality of service of database products in different business scenarios. Only by improving the underlying technology, data and model algorithms of the product according to the business characteristics and attributes can the efficiency and intelligence of the business system be improved, so as to gain the favor of the market.
07 Improving security capabilities is the key to stability
Data, as an asset, has become the fifth factor of production, and the importance of data security is self-evident. As a data bearer tool, how to ensure the security of data in the collection and storage of pipes is worthy of in-depth study. From the perspective of the database itself, improving the security protection capability mainly starts from the perspective of security access control, focusing on how to prevent malicious access and malicious tampering of data, and ensuring the ownership, ownership and use of data assets. The promulgation of Equal Protection 2.0 and the Cybersecurity Law also puts forward explicit requirements for data security management in information systems. With the wide application of cloud computing, big data and other technologies, data security protection can enter the stage of intrinsic security reinforcement from the original compliance, the connotation and extension of security will change accordingly, and the height of security protection has risen from individual security to system security and even a larger category of ecological security. In order to meet the new security requirements, the database should combine hardware, applications, and data, and combine security technologies to form an overall security defense system.
Database products currently have a large number of technologies and mechanisms to ensure data security, security database in the introduction of pre-machine, security audits and other measures to provide effective protection will also lead to data access efficiency reduction. We still need to balance security and business efficiency, overemphasizing the security of database products will more or less lose the convenience of application, and making security and efficiency trade-offs based on factors such as data importance is the key to ensuring business stability.
08 Embracing open source is the only way to go
Open source is a major trend, from the database rankings at home and abroad, the popularity of open source products is rising. Open source has greatly promoted the dissemination and use of industry product technology, so that developers, practitioners and enthusiasts around the world can stand on the basis of the technology of predecessors and continuously promote the technological development of databases. Open source software has effectively promoted the development of basic software such as domestic databases and operating systems, and a large number of domestic manufacturers have transformed and improved their own product capabilities on the basis of learning from open source ideas and ideas and related excellent results.
As a database vendor and practitioner, we should actively embrace open source in our thinking, and we should also face up to the problems existing in open source. Open source products are different from commercial software, and there are many restrictions in the use path, application effect, security protection, and support of important application scenarios. Some open source technologies are controlled by the foundation, which will also cause intellectual property disputes and even legal problems, and it is necessary to use open source protocols to reconcile conflicts between knowledge sharing and commercial applications, and ensure the flow of technical resources.
While embracing open source, we should also actively give back to the open source community. Domestic practitioners should pay more attention to dedication in open source, it is not advisable to only ask for and not pay, and it is also necessary to find problems, point out problems and actively give back while using open source technology to help research and development. Nowadays, China's open source community shows a good development trend, but compared with the international open source community is still in the learning and running stage, the formation of an independent and strong open source community is the goal that the entire industry should strive to achieve.
09 Refactoring the basic framework is the hope of the gold warehouse
With the development of Xinchuang, after solving a series of security problems, in the future broader pan-xinchuang era, the database and even the infrastructure of the entire IT industry should be reshaped. For domestic databases, we must redefine, generate and promote the next generation of database infrastructure that leads international standards, and get rid of the shackles of wintel system and IOE architecture. In order to achieve this goal, we will focus on building our own hard-core capabilities, desperately take root in building an ecosystem, provide users with more reliable, safer, more intelligent, and more integrated database products, solve performance, function and safety issues in a variety of business environments, help the national production platform to be widely used in the market, reshape user business systems, achieve intelligent operation from a business perspective, and maximize the use of data value.