OceanBase Database emerged with the e-commerce business of Alibaba Group and grew with the mobile payment business of Ant Group. After more than 10 years of practice in various business areas, OceanBase Database was launched to the external market. This topic describes the milestones during the development of OceanBase Database.
Birth
In 2010, Dr. Yang Zhenkun, the founder of OceanBase, initiated the OceanBase project with the startup team. OceanBase Database was first applied to Taobao Favorites, which is still a customer of OceanBase Database. In Taobao Favorites, a single table stores a large amount of data. To support the development of Taobao Favorites, the OceanBase team developed a unique method to process highly concurrent requests for joining large tables with small tables.
Relational database
In early versions, OceanBase Database is accessible with custom APIs. In 2012, OceanBase Database that supports SQL was released. This makes OceanBase Database a general-purpose relational database that provides complete features.
Preliminary application in financial business
OceanBase Database was introduced in Alipay (renamed as Ant Group) and began to serve financial business. During the Double 11 in 2014, OceanBase Database began to carry some of the traffic of the transaction database. Later, the newly established MYbank ran all of its core transaction databases on OceanBase Database.
Core databases for financial business
In 2016, OceanBase Database V1.0 with a newly designed architecture was released. This version supports distributed transactions, improves scalability in highly concurrent write operations, and introduces the multi-tenancy architecture. The overall architecture of this version is still in use. In addition, during the Double 11 in 2016, the business traffic of all the core databases of Alipay ran 100% on OceanBase Database, including transaction, payment, and membership databases, and the 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. The mode reduces the costs of application restructuring and adaptation and was widely recognized among external customers.
Setting new world records
In 2019, OceanBase Database V2.2 ranked first with 60 million tpmC in the world's most authoritative TPC-C test for online transaction processing (OLTP). In 2020, OceanBase Database achieved another world record with 0.7 billion tpmC. This demonstrates the excellent scalability and stability of OceanBase Database. OceanBase Database is the first and only Chinese database product in TPC-C rankings to date.
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.
