Trip.com is a leading one-stop travel service provider, offering flights, hotels, trains, and other travel services to users worldwide. The company operates in 24 languages across 39 countries and regions, with a global network spanning more than 1.7 million hotels and flights from over 600 airlines.

As Trip.com’s always-on services expanded, its legacy MySQL architecture hit a wall. Schema changes dragged on, replication risks threatened stability, and bloated tables ate into storage and compute resources. To break through these bottlenecks, Trip.com migrated to OceanBase, building a distributed database foundation that drastically improved performance, slashed storage costs, and fortified system resilience.

The Challenge

As Trip.com's business modules migrated onto MySQL running on commodity PC servers, the architecture that once served the platform's early growth began to crack under the pressure of global-scale operations:

• High-Risk schema changes: Adding columns or indexes to large production tables in MySQL required multi-week operations that consumed more than 120% of storage capacity during execution. For a platform where millions of users depend on uninterrupted service, every schema change carried real stability risk.
• Data consistency across multi-node: Binlog-based replication introduced inconsistencies between primary and standby nodes, even with RAID 10 disk arrays in place. This creates an operational risk that required constant manual vigilance. When failovers occurred, the team could not guarantee that replicas held identical data.
• Storage limits at the table level. The IM system’s group message table alone was nearing single-table storage ceilings, creating a bottleneck with no clean MySQL-native path to resolve. Meanwhile, standard resource allocation across business modules meant that some workloads were over-provisioned while others were starved — a pattern that worsened as traffic patterns diverged across Trip.com’s growing product portfolio.

The Solution

Trip.com needed a unified platform that delivered massive scalability without the operational tax of fragmented workarounds. OceanBase’s native distributed architecture, combined with multitenancy and advanced compression, provided the exact mix of high availability and efficiency the team required.

• Frictionless online DDL: OceanBase transformed schema changes from weeks-long ordeals into seconds-long tasks. For instance, adding a new field to the massive IM group message table now happens instantly, with zero impact on live traffic.
• Bulletproof consistency & automated failover: By moving away from legacy replication protocols, OceanBase simplified leader/follower management. Built-in distributed consensus ensures strict data consistency and automates failover, eliminating manual panic during node failures.
• Dramatic storage compression: OceanBase’s advanced encoding algorithms fundamentally changed Trip.com’s storage economics. For example, a table that previously hogged 800 GB in MySQL shrank to just 200 GB.
• Granular Resource Control: With native multitenancy, Trip.com can now pool resources in a shared cluster while isolating business modules into distinct tenants. This allows them to scale individual workloads on demand, maximizing hardware utilization.
• Unified Workloads: Consolidating transactional and analytical workloads into a single database environment cut down on replication lag and enabled smarter, real-time data processing.

Trip.com migrated from MySQL to OceanBase using OceanBase Migration Service (OMS), which supported both full and incremental data synchronization to ensure consistency and zero downtime during the transition. The migration preserved business continuity throughout with no data loss or service interruption.

Business Impact

After migrating to OceanBase, Trip.com achieved measurable improvements in performance, efficiency, and operational stability.

Higher performance for large-scale online services

After migrating to OceanBase, Trip.com measured a 3x improvement in write throughput and a 2x improvement in read performance across production workloads, directly translating to faster response times for the millions of users querying hotel availability, booking tickets, and exchanging messages daily.

66% storage reduction for higher capacity efficiency

OceanBase's encoding and compression reduced Trip.com's storage footprint by roughly two-thirds compared to MySQL, with standout results on the largest tables (800 GB → 200 GB on the IM group message table). The savings lowered infrastructure costs while simultaneously improving query performance on compressed data.

Zero-downtime operations during change and maintenance

Online schema changes, node scaling, and data center maintenance now execute without service impact. Leader/follower switchover became fully automated, and OceanBase's distributed architecture supports dynamic node scaling during peak travel periods without resource contention.

Better infrastructure efficiency with operational simplicity

By using multitenancy and OceanBase's hybrid transactional/analytics processing (HTAP) architecture, Trip.com was able to run real-time analytics running alongside transaction processing without separate ETL, independent scaling per business module, and a migration path that proved the viability of replacing MySQL at scale without business disruption.

Looking Ahead

For a global travel platform like Trip.com, infrastructure limits directly translate to business limits. By replacing an overburdened MySQL setup with OceanBase, Trip.com didn't just solve immediate operational pains—they built a resilient, highly efficient data foundation fully prepared to handle the next era of global travel.