DANA is one of Indonesia’s leading digital wallet and payment platforms. Founded in 2018, it has scaled rapidly—reaching a user base approaching 200 million in 2024, according to DANA leadership. DANA supports daily financial activities such as money transfers, top-ups, card binding, and QR-based payments through Indonesia’s national QRIS network.
For a payments platform operating at national scale, the database is not just an infrastructure layer—it is the core trust system. Customers and merchants expect transactions to be available, consistent, and recoverable even during peak campaigns and unexpected traffic spikes.
Challenges & Requirements
As adoption and transaction volume surged, DANA’s early MySQL-like architecture began to strain under real-world fintech workloads:
- Scalability Limitations: The system frequently "hit the ceiling" during peak transaction periods, unable to cope with the soaring volumes and unpredictable workloads . The initial small-scale cluster architecture lacked the native horizontal scalability required to sustain meteoric business growth.
- Data Consistency Risk: The asynchronous replication model inherent in the MySQL architecture could not guarantee a high success rate or data consistency during high-availability switchovers, posing a significant risk to a financial service provider.
- Operational Complexity: DANA faced the daunting task of maintaining system stability and operational efficiency while simultaneously planning a complex transition from an on-premises setup to a more flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure.
"Initially, DANA used a MySQL-compatible database. However, due to the rapid growth in online transactions and the number of partner merchants, the existing database for transaction management, payment, accounting, membership, and marketing systems had difficulty scaling elastically during peak hours. The system frequently hit capacity limits, driving DANA to seek a more robust database solution. "
Zikry Zakiyulfuadi
Chief Technology Officer of DANA
Why OceanBase
DANA sought a robust, modern database solution that could provide financial-grade reliability and seamless scalability. OceanBase Database was selected for its proven capabilities in mission-critical environments and its unique architectural advantages.
Financial-Grade Consistency during HA Events
In DANA’s earlier MySQL-style architecture, asynchronous replication introduced unavoidable risk during high-availability switchovers, which is unacceptable when every transaction must be correct and reconcilable.
OceanBase’s distributed design is built to maintain strong consistency across replicas, reducing the operational and data risks that come from asynchronous replication patterns in critical workloads.
Active-Active Architecture for Real Throughput
OceanBase supports an active-active cluster approach where workloads can be distributed across nodes. This greatly improves resource utilization and maintains stable performance while strengthening availability.
Scale-Out without Disruption
DANA’s growth pattern required a database that scales horizontally as a normal operation. The distributed architecture of OceanBase provides native horizontal scalability, allowing DANA to start small and effortlessly scale up to handle thousands of transactions per second.
A Credible Path to Hybrid Cloud
DANA’s architecture target was hybrid: run steady workloads efficiently while gaining cloud flexibility for resilience and spikes. OceanBase’s architecture fit this direction naturally, enabling DANA to place replicas across local IDC + public cloud while maintaining consistency and availability goals.
Equally important, DANA needed to migrate at scale without destabilizing production. OceanBase Migration Service (OMS) provided the tooling to move hundreds of MySQL instances to OceanBase, reducing migration risk and accelerating rollout.
Strategic Partnership and Support
Beyond the technology, DANA valued the commitment to customer care. OceanBase provides unrivaled 24/7 global remote technical support, with engineers joining DANA's "war room" to ensure rapid problem resolution. This level of partnership was deemed exemplary and essential for DANA to achieve its rapid growth targets.
Solution Architecture
The core of the solution was the deployment of OceanBase Database's 3-replica architecture , strategically implemented to build a resilient and highly available hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- Hybrid Resilience with Geographic Redundancy: By placing replicas across on-prem and cloud environments, DANA improved fault tolerance and strengthened disaster recovery options while maintaining local performance for steady workloads.
- High Availability with Fast Recovery: DANA described OceanBase’s design as active-active in practice—distributing workload across nodes rather than relying on an idle standby—and cited a recovery capability of RTO < 8 seconds.
- Elastic Scale-out without Business Interruption: OceanBase’s native horizontal scalability enabled DANA to expand from a 3-node (1-1-1) to a 6-node (2-2-2) cluster without business interruption, improving both capacity and performance as demand increased.
Migration & Rollout
DANA’s rollout followed a pragmatic sequence that reduced risk while the platform remained live:
Phase 1 — Initial Deployment (2018)
DANA adopted OceanBase on-premises in 2018 to address urgent capacity and performance constraints and establish a scalable foundation.
Phase 2 — Hybrid Cloud Migration (2019)
In 2019, DANA evolved toward a hybrid cloud setup to gain elasticity for spikes and improve resilience. DANA leadership noted that being fully on-prem or fully in public cloud was not optimal; hybrid offered a more practical balance between cost efficiency and burst capacity.
Phase 3 — Large-Scale migration with OMS
To support the hybrid architecture, OceanBase Migration Service (OMS) was used to migrate hundreds of instances from MySQL to OceanBase on the public cloud. This helped DANA progress toward the target state while controlling migration complexity across many systems supporting payments, billing, membership, and other core services.
Throughout the transition, DANA emphasized the value of close technical collaboration with OceanBase—especially during critical migrations and incident response moments.
The Results
OceanBase helped DANA move from “scaling pressure” to a repeatable operating model for growth, with outcomes across reliability, resilience, and operations:
- Solid Production Reliability: Following the 2019 hybrid cloud rollout, DANA achieved critical operational milestones within a year, recording zero database failures and zero data loss in 2020, while maintaining an overall business system availability exceeding 99.99%.
- Uncapped Scalability: Replacing legacy MySQL eliminated the database capacity constraints that had previously threatened to stall expansion. Today, OceanBase effortlessly handles high-concurrency traffic, supporting tens of millions of active users on a platform that scaled to nearly 200 million total users by 2024.
- Future-Proof Disaster Recovery: To further fortify service availability, DANA is currently constructing a third IDC on the public cloud. This strategic move toward a tri-IDC hybrid cloud architecture will dramatically enhance their disaster recovery posture.
- Empowered Local Operations: Beyond the technology, DANA invested in long-term self-sufficiency. Through a structured training program of theory and hands-on practice, DANA built a dedicated, local team of OceanBase DBAs—accelerating troubleshooting, streamlining daily maintenance, and ensuring full operational independence.
