From a Domestic Payment-Supporting Distributed Database to a Global Payment-Supporting Distributed Database

As a frontrunner in Malaysia's FinTech sector, TNG Digital has deeply integrated its TNG eWallet into the daily payment lives of millions, comprehensively covering high-frequency scenarios like transportation, dining, and money transfers. Since 2018, its user base has grown explosively by over 10-fold. By 2025, it serves 25 million verified users out of Malaysia's 33 million population, establishing itself as a critical information infrastructure supporting the regional digital economy and crucial public services.

However, rapid growth brought a technical "make-or-break test." Leveraging its core technical strengths—native distribution, zero-downtime operations, and full-stack multi-cloud compatibility—OceanBase precisely solved TNG Digital’s pain points regarding high-concurrency support and business continuity. This collaboration facilitated a leapfrog upgrade, transitioning the company from a "downtime crisis" to "99.99% high availability."

This partnership not only provides the technical cornerstone for TNG Digital's scalable profitability but also sets a benchmark for how distributed database technology can empower a leading Southeast Asian FinTech's core payment scenarios. It offers a new practical path for foundational distributed database software to expand globally, combining "technical adaptation with low-cost implementation."

Growing Pains: Data Foundation Shortcomings in High-Concurrency FinTech

As the core platform carrying daily payments for tens of millions of users in Malaysia, TNG Digital's system stability directly impacts user experience and financial market order. Leslie Lip, TNG Digital's CTO, admitted that behind the 2-3x annual business growth was a constant battle against the "scalability trap." The core pain points centered on four shortcomings in their data foundation:

1. Failure to Cope with Sudden Traffic Peaks:

During peak payment times, such as the midday rush, the entire eWallet system bears immense transaction pressure. The original database struggled to support non-conventional, sudden traffic surges, such as government subsidy disbursements. A data anomaly TNG Digital experienced six years ago was directly traced to a flaw in the original database architecture, where server resources were bottlenecked despite underutilization, exposing the core data foundation's lack of "impact resistance."

2. Downtime Risk During Business Iteration:

FinTech platforms require frequent table schema updates (DDL changes) to adapt to payment innovation. However, DDL changes in the original database often led to production environment downtime, directly affecting the continuity of core operations like payments and transfers, becoming a "stumbling block" to rapid business iteration.

3. Compatibility Barriers to Multi-Cloud Expansion:

Initially relying on Alibaba Cloud, TNG Digital expanded its reach to Azure and AWS as its scale grew. However, database services across different cloud vendors created an adaptation gap, preventing cross-cloud collaborative O&M and exposing the company to "vendor lock-in" risk, which constrained TNG Digital's global expansion pace.

4. Performance and Cost Imbalance:

User growth resulted in explosive data accumulation. The original database's low storage efficiency led to continuously rising IDC O&M and storage costs. Simultaneously, throughput, even on the same hardware specifications, could not keep pace with business demand, creating a vicious cycle of "rising costs and stagnant performance."

OceanBase’s Solution: "Payment-Grade" Capability Meets Core FinTech Needs

Leslie Lip emphasized that the core rationale for choosing OceanBase was "solving real business pain points, not merely chasing technical parameter upgrades." OceanBase provided a full-stack solution tailored for FinTech's characteristics, addressing TNG Digital's core demands for high concurrency, business continuity, and multi-cloud scalability:

1. Zero-Downtime DDL Solves Iteration Challenges:

Leveraging its native distributed architecture, OceanBase achieved a critical technical breakthrough: zero-downtime execution of core table DDL operations. During the Proof of Concept (POC) phase, DDL tests were completed under a concurrent scenario of 40,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS) CRUD operations, with zero service interruption and zero performance degradation. This feature completely eliminated the downtime risk during TNG Digital's high-frequency iteration, clearing a major technical obstacle for rapid payment innovation.

2. Native Distributed Architecture Withstands Peak Pressure:

OceanBase adopts a "share-nothing" native distributed architecture with linear elastic scalability, allowing for on-demand capacity expansion to support business growth. This capability not only easily handles regular midday peak traffic but also absorbs the shock of non-conventional surges like government subsidy disbursements, fundamentally eliminating downtime risk and perfectly matching the extreme high-availability requirements of payment scenarios.

3. Full-Stack Multi-Cloud Consistency Experience:

OceanBase features a built-in multi-cloud compatibility module, offering a unified technical interface and adaptation layer that seamlessly works with the underlying environments of Alibaba Cloud, Azure, and AWS. This ensures end-to-end consistency in deployment architecture, O&M operations, performance, and compliance auditing across different cloud platforms.

4. High Compression Ratio + High-Performance Optimization Boosts Efficiency:

OceanBase’s high-compression data engine achieves a 5x reduction in data volume, significantly lowering storage and O&M costs. Furthermore, its distributed execution engine optimization delivered a 40% throughput increase on the same hardware specifications, precisely solving TNG Digital’s dilemma of "rising costs and stagnant performance" and providing technical support for the FinTech firm’s path to profitability.

5. Full MySQL Compatibility Accelerates Implementation:

OceanBase’s deep-tuned MySQL compatibility layer ensures full compatibility in syntax, application behavior, and drivers. This key feature allowed the TNG Digital team to quickly adapt with zero additional learning costs, dramatically shortening the project migration and implementation cycle, and ensuring a "smooth transition" for the technology upgrade. As Leslie Lip stated, OceanBase is not just a database, but a "technical platform that can grow with the company's ambitions."