This article is reprinted from the public account “Science and Technology Observation of Shen Yao”
As we know, 7 times mentioned in the “difference” planning “digital economy”, referring to “digital” 24 times, and clearly the digital economy in separate, depicts the new blueprint to the construction of digital China in the next five years, while the development of the digital economy with data as the key factors of production, driven by data processing technology as the core, This makes the database become the key technology of digital industrialization, it is not only the key support of industrial digitization, but also the solid data base of digital economy.
In this context, On June 1 last year, OceanBase announced the registration of “Beijing Auxingbes Technology Co., LTD.”, officially starting its independent operation, which marks that OceanBase has embarked on the track of large-scale commercialization and also stepped onto a new stage of development.
One year later, on the same day, OceanBase presented its future development strategy systematically from three dimensions of technology, business and ecology for the first time at the Database OceanBase 3.0 Summit. More importantly, OceanBase announced the official open source and established the OceanBase open source community. The official website of the community was launched simultaneously, and 3 million lines of core code were opened to the community.
So what did OceanBase, a freshman, produce this past year? What are the important considerations behind the announcement of official open source? What are OceanBase’s new plans and layouts for the future? With these questions in mind, the author had an in-depth communication with Yang Bing, CEO of OceanBase, and Yang Chuanhui, CTO of OceanBase.
Independently operated, OceanBase this year
In the movie “The Fighter,” there is a memorable line: “There is a difference between knowing where you are going and taking the road.” Indeed, for Yang Bing, from a middle-level cadre of Ant Group to the CEO of a new independently operated company, the pressure and challenges he faced can be imagined, and in his impression, several things he experienced in the past year are still “vivid” today.
OceanBase CEO Yang Bing
The first is direction. Yang bing said that since the establishment of the new company, he and the company’s management team have been discussing the future strategic direction of OceanBase. Give up? Do only offline? Do you want the online one? What do you do in the short term? What do you do in the long term? And so on, these are very difficult choices, very difficult decisions.
However, after many times of communication and discussion, the management team believes that adhering to the road of self-development and opening is not only the right direction, but also worthy of Full investment by OceanBase. “In the strategic direction of the future, we hope in a few key sectors for replacing the core system database, the most difficult task of the bone, at the same time in the field of database, as we have three TPC brush list to become the world, we also hope to conquer the most difficult in the commercial products that part of the core technology, To really make OceanBase the best database in the world.” He said.
Second, keep your promises. At the end of last year, a head insurance company approached OceanBase, hoping to transform the database of the full-stack core system. At the same time, smooth migration and distributed transformation of the new and old core systems should be completed at the same time. It can be said that the head insurance company “gave all its assets” to OceanBase, which is undoubtedly the absolute trust of OceanBase.
The old core of the head insurance company had a large amount of code developed by proc+ Tuxedo, which would have required tens of thousands of lines of code to be rewritten if the program were to be modified to fit. Under the condition of tight time and heavy task, the team led by OceanBase CTO Yang Chuanhui specially set up a technical breakthrough team. After working day and night for 28 days, the team successfully helped the customer develop a version compatible with “Proc + TuxEDO” and realized low-cost transformation of business applications. After the launch of the new system, significant benefits have been achieved in disaster recovery capability, cost saving and performance improvement.
In Yang bing’s opinion, the core reason why the project could be delivered within a short time is OceanBase’s insistence on self-research. The benefits of self-research have come to the forefront as OceanBase has expanded commercially over the past year. “Our technical team has a strong technical background and knows how all the code is written, so it can successfully deliver the project to the customer under great pressure within a month and fulfill the promise to the customer.”
In fact, setting direction and keeping promises are just a microcosm of the challenges OceanBase has faced in its commercialization process. Over the past 365 days, OceanBase has been working hard and has delivered a satisfactory “report card” in terms of customers, ecology and products.
In terms of product innovation, OceanBase added 1.13 million codes; 882 delivery requirements; Completed 2 iterations of major version and 8 iterations of major version; Efficiency increased by 28%. Critically, OceanBase has released version 3.0, an enterprise-class distributed database that supports HTAP mixed load with 50 percent better transaction processing performance and 10 times better data analysis performance than in the past.
At the same time, in terms of ecological cooperation, OceanBase has also completed in-depth cooperation with 40 excellent partners in the industry. OceanBase certified engineers increased by 10,000 +; Technology/service partners also expanded to 12; In addition, tens of millions of resources are invested to participate in the construction of talents in colleges and universities; In terms of customer service, Currently OceanBase has served 200 customers in total. Complete the verification of 500+ scenarios and 2000+ external instances; The total capacity of data delivered is up to 4PB+.
It can be seen that after one year of commercial operation, OceanBase has delivered a satisfactory “answer sheet”, and the continuous choice and trust of customers and ecological partners proves that the old saying “if the direction is right, there is no fear of a long road”. This kind of continuous verification also makes OceanBase more confident and active when it enters the “second grade”.
Open source, OceanBase bar mitzvah
This confidence and activity is reflected in OceanBase’s official Open source announcement on June 1. This Open source has several features. It chooses the Open Core business model and opens all 3 million lines of Core code. Mulan public protocol Mulanpub-2.0, which allows all community participants to modify, use and reference the code freely; For code hosting, Gitee is the host site, and the image is on Github.
There is no doubt that “open source is eating everything” today, and open source database companies in the market are also highly recognized by developers and investors. So for OceanBase, is it a move to “follow the trend” at this time, or another important consideration? Yang Bing told me, “OceanBase firmly chose open source and openness, a decision not only the internal team did not struggle with, but also the senior management of Ant Group strongly supported when making the decision.”
The reason behind this is that database is an ecological industry, and OceanBase also hopes that these core capabilities at the bottom can be replicated by upper-level data processing software through open source, so as to grow a more complete ecology. At the same time, the new model of open source will also enable OceanBase to serve more large and medium-sized enterprises. In the future, OceanBase will adhere to the new model of simultaneous commercialization and open source, promote the simultaneous upgrading and iteration of the commercial version and open source version, and promote the healthy development of the whole Database industry in China.
Yang Chuanhui also said that open source has risen for OceanBase important technical strategy, the open source also give full consideration to the technical and commercial development strategic decision: on the one hand, if the database industry still copy “path” is to go in the past, now not only open source is the trend of The Times, the cloud become more than offline higher business model; On the other hand, open source is also of great value to the ecological development of OceanBase. As a self-developed database system, OceanBase needs to become three database systems parallel to MySQL and Oracle, and open source naturally becomes a “natural thing”.
At the summit, OceanBase also announced plans for the open source community, including an inaugural developer competition in September; In January 2022, the Community edition will further improve stand-alone performance and add tenant and table-level recovery capabilities. In March next year, the first developer conference will be held. Meanwhile, HTAP will enhance its capability and add multi-mode architecture to realize the common “evolution” with the commercial version to fully support the ecological development.
Chuan-hui Yang, CTO, OceanBase
Of course, Yang chuan-hui admitted that compared to other database open source processes, OceanBase open source challenges may be more difficult, the upfront learning “steep cost” is bound to exist. To this end, OceanBase has also set up a separate open source community operations team, and launched three initiatives for talent, users and developers.
Take the user-oriented “Ten Miles of Spring Breeze” program as an example, OceanBase will provide VIP community service for 10 seed users, provide technical transformation support and training, and provide joint research and development support for products. Yang chuanhui said, “In the future, I will actively preach to customers and offer exclusive services, without asking for any return from customers. I just want to help customers to use OceanBase. I also set a goal for myself to do a live stream every two months, not to talk about ideas, but to share technology and code.”
Yang Bing also believes that OceanBase has always been “determined” in its strategic direction, “real material” in its open source technology, and “sincere” in its open source attitude. Therefore, although OceanBase did not have rich experience in open source operation in the past, it still has a lot to learn. However, in the future, there will be a special team to do design operation, version maintenance and ecological construction, which will be the foundation to win the trust of developers. I believe OceanBase open source version will also welcome its loyal fans.
From this perspective, this open source opening is more like a “coming-of-age ceremony” after OceanBase’s independent operation, which not only means OceanBase’s innovation in product technology and business model, but also its help to ecological partners “will never stop”. The greater value also lies in the fact that the open source will definitely make OceanBase overturn itself to overturn the industry and play a more decisive role in reconstructing the new pattern of database market in China and even the world.
Go ahead resolutely and do what is difficult but right
Objectively speaking, the road to success of no enterprise is smooth and not tortuous, and it is difficult to find the “standard” answer from textbooks. In other words, it must have the courage to pick the rose on the edge of the cliff to qualify for the pass on the road to success.
Looking back, OceanBase has chosen the “Hard” mode since the day it was born. Whether it is Yang Zhenkun, founder of OceanBase, who led the team to choose the road of self-research and innovation, or the technology of database in the distributed field, or even the technology of HTAP in the direction of database, For the past 11 years, OceanBase has been living up to its value of “doing what’s hard and right.”
“There is no shortage of a database company in China, but there is a shortage of a high-end database that can really do core replacement,” says Mr Yang. If OceanBase just follows the footsteps of predecessors, it is impossible for it to surpass itself in the same way. Therefore, we must constantly force ourselves to make technological breakthroughs and innovations, and enter the no man’s land we have never been to again and again, and move forward resolutely and firmly.”
In his opinion, when the key core system of the enterprise began to go on the cloud, the disadvantages of the traditional database can be seen clearly, and today distributed database has become the “new base” of the enterprise database. In this process, database still faces new challenges in the fields of multi-module data processing, “hybrid heterogeneous” cloud and incremental business migration, which will be an important technical problem OceanBase hopes to solve in the future.
This is also why OceanBase released the latest version 3.0 product and announced the official open source driver. Based on the current scale and technical bonus, What OceanBase hopes more in the future is to provide customers with stronger database capability to carry out distributed transformation of core system at lower price and threshold. Core system not only can let the enterprise to achieve the overall system is completely autonomous control, as well as business stability, continuity, under the premise of not reduce support business agility, and finally to every single transaction/each account cost reduction targets, eventually in the future for Chinese enterprise technology innovation and digital transformation more fuel.
In response, Yang Chuanhui said: “OceanBase future will face many fronts, as well as commercial, and to do open source, but also achieve a variety of technical innovation, the process will be very difficult, but we are still at work is exciting, this is because the database in the future as an important circuit in the enterprise market, will have their own” prime time “, We believe that a bigger market and bigger space are waiting for us to innovate and explore.”
“OceanBase has been a well-known name in the development of Ant Group in the past, and has changed the history of ant. Standing at the key entrance of digitization and intelligence in the next decade, OceanBase also hopes to play a greater role and value on the stage of China and the world, becoming the ‘new pedestal’ for enterprise databases.”
American writer Maxwell once wrote in his book All Win, “The secret of success is to forget your own interests and focus on helping your partners succeed.” Therefore, whether in the short term to solve the industry user database “pain point”; The necessity of insisting on independent innovation of basic software in China; As well as the market background of the rise of China’s digital economy in the long term, more Chinese technology companies are required to play their roles, and companies like OceanBase are also required to play more roles in the market.
In the process, OceanBase insists on doing difficult and the right thing, in the past 11 years, with its strong technical strength and ability, proves that Chinese database vendors can and world-class database vendors “compete”, and this time officially open source, will undoubtedly further prosperity database, ecological environment, in turn, the success of more customers and partners in the industry, This is also the significance of OceanBase’s “open, win-win and start afresh”.