OceanBase won the “Innovative Product of the Year” award in the 2019 DTCC China Database Technology Annual selection. Han Hongyuan was interviewed by Lao Yu, editor-in-chief of IT168.
From the product itself, to the needs of the industry, to the future of the database, we will discuss in depth the 8 hottest topics in the industry. I hope it inspires you.
The significance and value of OceanBase winning the Innovative Product of the Year award
In such an environment, it is meaningful for IT168, a media organization with the technical foundation and credibility of the industry, to conduct the selection of the entire database industry. In fact, it can simplify the complexity of customers’ choice.
In the database this thing, Ant Financial actually continued to do a long time investment. Hu Xi, deputy CTO of Ant Financial, has said on many occasions that Ant Financial’s technological capability is a manifestation of our belief, that is to say, technological idealism and national feelings inspire us to continue to innovate in the technological field.
What is the financial industry most concerned about
Cost performanceThe same is true of the financial industry. But performance is not simply refers to the speed of the performance, there will be a comprehensive performance evaluation. For example, the efficiency of operation is certainly a key indicator, as well as stability, reliability, convenience, including the friendliness of application development, which are actually performance indicators.
But in the price ratio of this matter, in fact, for a long time since we have such a misunderstanding. For example, if you drop the price to zero, and everything is infinite, how do you compare the price to performance?
So in fact, when comparing cost performance, we often ignore a very important factor because of the simplicity of this expression. When you compare cost performance, in fact, the premise is that the performance has to meet a benchmark before it makes sense to compare cost performance. In this case, different industries are very different.
In fact, the performance requirements of the financial industry are very comprehensive and high. Therefore, in this case, it may be more meaningful to set a good threshold value and then compare it. In the future, I think customers will gradually understand and pay more attention to this aspect.
OceanBase’s three core keywords
Han Hongyuan: The first key word of OceanBase must be finance. OceanBase is a database that grows up in the operating environment of finance. OceanBase has been tested by a very strong financial core, number one.
Secondly, To some extent, OceanBase carries the core business of a large number of business systems of Ant Financial, which is another very big feature that distinguishes it from other database manufacturers.
The third point is that OceanBase has made a lot of technological innovations, so OceanBase has adopted a mechanism that is not exactly the same as traditional database, and has broken through many bottlenecks and limitations, so as to achieve a very good effect today.
Other more keywords can be understood as the essence of the three core content expanded out of some forms of expression. In fact, generally speaking, I think these points are a very prominent feature that distinguishes us from other database products.
OceanBase’s core competitiveness
Han Hongyuan: For OceanBase, people pay more attention to its technical features, such as simple indicators, which are easier for people to understand. But from my perspective, OceanBase has three core strengths that are very important.
The first point is that OceanBase has passed the test of Ant Financial’s comprehensive application scenarios, including the annual “Double 11” promotion, daily and periodic preferential activities and marketing activities. OceanBase has continuously polished the required technical support capabilities through these scenarios, and has gone through extensive and high pressure verification.
The second point is that all the core systems of Ant Financial, including Alipay and other core systems, are completely run on OceanBase, which is independently developed by us. This is a very big commitment for users.
We have all of our assets tied to this database, so we’re going to make sure that it works well, that it really supports our business, that it’s really stable, that it’s tested.
Not only the performance, but also the functions and stability of all aspects, and even the extreme needs that can only be brought by many extreme scenarios, we have added it to the product. OceanBase has been polished to become more and more mature and perfect.
The third point is how to make the newly developed software make full use of all the technical advantages to achieve a better effect in today’s technology development scene, with new technologies emerging every day.
OceanBase has done a lot in this area, including performance, high availability, reliability, and even the pioneering use of many breakthrough technologies. We will continue to take full advantage of the technology.
Continued improvement in distributed architecture and compatibility
Han Hongyuan: Actually, when people visit OceanBase today, they often define OceanBase as a new generation of distributed database. There are some very difficult problems in distributed databases, such as data consistency in distributed cases. These issues were not fully supported in previous versions, including many other implementations.
In Version 2.0 of OceanBase, we have fully enhanced distributed architecture capabilities. Such as providing globally consistent views, which are difficult to implement in distributed scenarios. Including our extensive optimization and support for transaction scenarios, it actually ensures that when a distributed database is used as a centralized database in this way, customer acquisition is very difficult and customer migration costs are very low. So from this point of view, OceanBase2.0 has made a very big breakthrough.
On the other hand, we are gradually increasing compatibility with Oracle. The goal of compatibility is not to bring Oracle applications directly to OceanBase, but rather to say that many users already have significant technical capabilities and investment in application development on Oracle. The driving force of OceanBase’s continuous compatibility is to ensure that the capabilities already possessed by these customers and the applications already developed can get the best reuse and investment protection in the future, which is also a very important direction.
Milestone events for OceanBase
Mr. Han: OceanBase started in 2010. In its earliest days, it was not a full-featured SQL database. When the origin is actually a distributed storage system, the main goal is to support taobao favorites in the application.
As we all know today, favorites are an application with a huge amount of data and very high access requests. With the increasing number of Taobao users and commodities, this system is still running on OceanBase. And after so many years of precipitation, in fact, has provided a very perfect support ability for Taobao favorites, which is actually a very important node.
When the core distributed data storage capability and data access capability are basically guaranteed, OceanBase products are gradually enhanced and optimized.
When we supported the favorites business, OceanBase was still in Alibaba Group. With the subsequent development of the business, we saw more development opportunities in Ant Financial, so the Group decided to transfer OceanBase products to Ant Financial for sustainable development.
Starting with The OceanBase 0.5 release, we began to try to make OceanBase work in the core trading system. In 2014, OceanBase was responsible for 10 percent of the traffic on Singles Day. After these initial validation, we subsequently gradually optimized and strengthened the technical capabilities of this part.
By 2015 and 2016, the core link of all core transactions on Alipay had been 100% carried on OceanBase. Since then OceanBase has grown into a very comprehensive, robust, and tested database product.
As an Internet bank, the business form of network commercial bank has a very prominent characteristics. When MyBank officially opened, all its core business systems had been 100% loaded on OceanBase. This once again proves OceanBase’s ability to support in real business scenarios.
After that, From 2016 and 2017, OceanBase began to be commercialized externally, and more and more enterprise customers were willing to trust OceanBase, including Bank of Nanjing, Bank of Suzhou, PICC and so on. After these customers choose OceanBase, in fact, OceanBase has played a very important role in their Internet system.
Today, we see a development trend is that the frequency of access to the bank mobile terminal is increasing, and the pressure on the back end is increasing, which also puts forward higher requirements for the back end system.
In the future, the ability of distributed architecture transformation and product support is a key competitiveness. In these aspects, OceanBase has been fully verified by many customers. Now, we are gradually opening up this capability to help more users build distributed technology systems that can meet the challenges of the future.
Product layout and new fiscal year goals
Han Hongyuan: After more than nine years of development, OceanBase database has developed very strong technical capabilities, including supporting all the core businesses of Ant Financial and many complex business systems.
However, in terms of the product itself, there are still a lot of areas that need to be improved. We will continue to enhance the capability of the product, and at the same time, we will increase the promotion efforts in the market.
In this regard, we will form a stronger joint force with Ali Group to carry out comprehensive product promotion in the market. So what you’re going to see is that we’re going to be doing a lot more in terms of product marketing, community building and empowerment.
What is the future of databases
Han Hongyuan: In fact, this is not the first time that the scene of database competition has appeared in the course of historical development. There are two main points today.
The first point is that, to date, the database that underlies enterprise applications is not a state that can be easily replaced. For example, when referring to databases, more emphasis may be placed on relational databases. In terms of the supporting ability of relational databases, it provides the simplicity of ACID transaction processing and the intuitiveness and convenience of SQL writing business logic, which may not be easily replaced today. When enterprise-level applications require more complex business logic, you will need an abstract platform at the bottom that can fully support your applications.
So my view is that relational databases will continue to evolve into mainstream databases for quite some time to come.
The other thing you see today is that the cloud is a very important trend. But cloud and database semantics are not at the same level. In fact, the database is a technology capability and the cloud is a way of using it. The relationship between the use mode and technical capability is a matching one, not a competition one.
So I don’t think that the so-called cloud database is fundamentally different from the traditional database in terms of technical capabilities, or that the emergence of the cloud will cause the traditional database to be completely unusable.
Today, many traditional databases are also trying to provide services on the cloud, and many of them have a certain effect. But in the future, I think the database is the embodiment of the ability of the database. Databases can be used in the cloud, non-cloud, and in a variety of richer ways.
In my opinion, a big challenge in the future is how to better support the cloud native applications in the way of cloud deployment, and continue to evolve and develop, which may be a very important direction to explore in the future.
But database as an independent technical ability exists, in quite a long time, it will play its own unique role and support value.
