OceanBase Database was born with the development of Alibaba's e-commerce business and grew with the expansion of the OceanBase team's mobile payment business. After over a decade of practice across various business domains, it finally emerged as a mature product and entered the external market. This topic briefly describes some milestone events in the development of OceanBase Database.
Inception
In 2010, Dr. Zhenkun Yang, the founder of OceanBase, led a startup team to initiate the OceanBase project. The first application was the Favorites feature of Taobao, which is still a customer of OceanBase today. The Favorites feature had a large amount of data in a single table, and OceanBase provided an innovative solution to meet its high-concurrency requirements for joining large and small tables.
Relational database
In early versions, applications accessed OceanBase Database through customized APIs. In 2012, OceanBase Database released a version that supported SQL, making it a general-purpose relational database that provides complete features.
Preliminary application in financial business
OceanBase Database entered Alipay (later known as the OceanBase team) and started to be applied in financial-grade business scenarios. During the Double 11 shopping festival in 2014, OceanBase Database began to handle a portion of the transaction database's traffic. Subsequently, the newly established MYbank ran all its core transaction databases on OceanBase Database.
Financial-grade core database
In 2016, OceanBase Database released V1.0 with a newly designed architecture, which added support for distributed transactions and improved scalability in high-concurrency write business. It also implemented a multi-tenant architecture, which is still in use today. During the Double 11 shopping festival in 2016, 100% of the core databases' business traffic of Alipay ran on OceanBase Database, including transactions, payments, membership, and the most critical accounting database.
Serving the external market
In 2017, OceanBase Database began to expand to external business and achieved initial success with the Bank of Nanjing.
Accelerating commercialization
In 2018, OceanBase Database V2.0 was released, which introduced the Oracle-compatible mode. This mode reduces the costs of application restructuring and adaptation and quickly gained popularity among external customers.
Reaching new heights
In 2019, OceanBase Database V2.2 participated in TPC-C, the world's most authoritative OLTP database benchmark, and topped the world rankings with a score of 60 million tpmC. Subsequently, in 2020, it set a new record with 700 million tpmC and has since maintained its top position. This fully demonstrates the excellent scalability and stability of OceanBase Database. It was the first distributed database to enter the TPC-C rankings and the first Chinese database to make the list.
HTAP
In 2021, OceanBase Database V3.0, with a new vectorized execution engine, set a new world record in the TPC-H benchmark test with a result of 15.26 million QphH@30000 GB. This marks a significant breakthrough for OceanBase Database in hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) with a single engine.
Opening up to open source
On June 1, 2021, OceanBase Database opened up to the open source community to help build a shared ecosystem.
