FAQ

1. Is OceanBase Database developed based on open-source databases or components?
   No. OceanBase Database is a native distributed database system built from scratch, including its transaction, SQL, and storage engines. Although OceanBase Database is compatible with most SQL syntaxes in mainstream versions of MySQL to facilitate database operations, OceanBase Database is not developed based on any existing open-source product.

2. Can I deploy and use OceanBase Database on different clouds?
   OceanBase Database supports multiple deployment modes. It can be deployed on a physical server in an on-premise data center, or on different clouds based on Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS). In addition, OceanBase Database will soon support public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can register a corresponding account to experience OceanBase Cloud.

3. What are the minimum resource requirements for the deployment of an OceanBase cluster?
   If you intend to try out OceanBase Database, you can just choose a single-node deployment with a minimum configuration of 2 CPU cores and 8 GB memory (2C8G). For the deployment method, see Quick Start.
   If you intend to use OceanBase Database in a production environment or for a stress test, we recommend that you deploy OceanBase Database on a node with a minimum configuration of 16 CPU cores, 128 GB memory, and 500 GB SSD storage. To deploy a three-replica OceanBase cluster, you need at least three such nodes.

4. Can I deploy OceanBase Database through a container?
   OceanBase Database supports multiple tenants in one cluster to achieve flexible scalability and maximum resource utilization. For more information, see Experience the multi-tenant feature. OceanBase Database also supports container-based deployment by using ob-operator.

5. How is the performance of OceanBase Database? Can you provide any relevant test reports?
   Based on its native distributed architecture, OceanBase Database has made many innovations and optimizations in terms of transaction, SQL, and storage engine. This brings OceanBase Database excellent performance and scalability in both high-concurrency OLTP and operational OLAP scenarios. OceanBase Database has broken the world records of TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark tests from 2019 to 2021. For more information about the test results, see https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results5.asp?resulttype=all.

6. Does OceanBase Database have a limit on the maximum distance between nodes? How is the transmission delay?
   OceanBase Database uses the multi-Paxos consensus protocol to ensure transaction consistency, high-availability, and disaster recovery. The Paxos voting members in a cluster can be up to 1,000 miles away from each other. The transaction duration in this case depends on the network latency between the nodes, which is usually 20 to 30 ms.

7. How does OceanBase Database achieve HTAP?
   OceanBase Database adopts a shared-nothing architecture that is similar to a massively parallel processing (MPP) system, and uses SQL execution engines for parallel computing. Therefore, OceanBase Database is naturally suitable for operational OLAP tasks. Note that the HTAP capability of OceanBase Database is implemented by the same database engine on the same set of data. Users do not need to export or synchronize data from the OLTP engine to another analytical engine. Data analysis and computing start immediately after the data is written online, which is beneficial to the real-time analytics. For more information about the operational OLAP capabilities of OceanBase Database, see Experience operational OLAP.

8. Does OceanBase Database support data distribution and subscription in a mode similar to CDC?
   Yes. OceanBase Database provides all change data capture (CDC) components for data distribution, subscription, and delivery to other systems. OceanBase Database supports not only message queuing systems, such as Apache Kafka and IBM MQ, but also source connectors, such as Flink CDC Connectors, for data synchronization to more destinations.

9. Does OceanBase Database support other unstructured data types, such as JSON?
   OceanBase Database supports not only structured data models, but also NoSQL capabilities that are compatible with HBase and Table models. In addition, OceanBase Database is also compatible with the JSON feature of MySQL 5.7 to support semi-structured data.

10. How can I migrate data from other databases to OceanBase Database?
    You can use OBLOADER and OBDUMPER or the LOAD DATA statement to migrate cold data to OceanBase Database. To migrate online data from a production system without loss, you can use OceanBase Migration Service (OMS), which is a GUI-based tool provided with OceanBase Community Edition.