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Picture this: It’s Double 11 (Singles’ Day), China’s colossal online shopping frenzy and millions are hitting ‘buy’ simultaneously. Behind the scenes, a distributed database called OceanBase is handling the massive traffic spikeensuring every transaction proceeds without a hitch.

OceanBase is not just built to handle peak shopping traffic; it was specifically designed to overcome the limitations of traditional monolithic databases. With its distributed architecture, OceanBase ensures ultra-low-latency transactions, high throughput, and seamless scalability — essential for industries that need to handle large-scale data and real-time applications. Its ability to process millions of transactions per second and its robust fault tolerance and elastic scaling capabilities have made it a newly emerged innovative force for businesses that demand reliability even during peak loads.

From crisis to creation

OceanBase’s origin story is one of necessity and innovation. Rewind to 2013: Alipay, already a leader in the payments world, faced a scaling crisis as its monolithic Oracle database struggled to handle the rising volume of transactions.

However, the technical challenges extended beyond just the database. “The entire technical infrastructure was a massive fabric under extreme stress,” explains OceanBase.  

Recognizing that throwing money at the database and hardware was not sustainable, Alipay developed a fully distributed database, OceanBase, from the ground up to resolve performance bottlenecks and scale effortlessly.

In 2019, OceanBase made history by becoming the first distributed database to top the TPC-C benchmark with a score of 60 million tpmC, outperforming Oracle on standard x86 servers. It then shattered its record in 2020 with 707 million tpmC. This marked a turning point, as it was the first time a distributed database claimed the top spot in the TPC-C benchmark, traditionally dominated by monolithic systems.

Open source, enterprise-ready

Today, OceanBase serves customers from a wide range of industries, from banks and insurers to telecom operators and retailers. Its open-source approach has been a driving force behind its growing popularity, making it accessible to developers worldwide and accelerating collaboration within the community.

“Open source is essential for expanding our global reach,” OceanBase says. Now, the open-source version of OceanBase supports technology exploration and collaboration and accelerates further innovations, while the enterprise version focuses on advanced security features, catering to the rigorous demands of financial institutions and customers from other sectors.

What sets OceanBase apart is its ability to deliver seamless, unified capabilities for mission-critical workloads, ensuring consistency and efficiency across transactional, analytical, and AI-driven operations.

Its hybrid TP and AP architecture ensures high performance for transactional and analytical workloads, eliminating the need for separate systems. With multi-model integration, OceanBase supports relational, JSON, Key Value and more, enabling businesses to handle diverse data types efficiently within a single database. Furthermore, its vector hybrid search capabilities empower AI-driven workloads, bringing generative AI and recommendation system applications into a unified database environment.

Beyond its unified design and performance, OceanBase is also secure, cost-efficient, and flexible. Security is paramount for financial institutions. OceanBase offers transparent data encryption, granular access controls, and comprehensive audit trails backed by SOC2 and PCI DSS certifications.

Additionally, OceanBase caters to a wide range of deployment scenarios, whether fully on-premises, cloud-native, or somewhere in between. This multi-cloud approach supports businesses to tailor their technical stack to meet specific needs while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Database for AI and hybrid workloads

OceanBase’s roadmap is designed to meet the growing complexity of modern data-driven workloads. Key upcoming features include enhanced Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) for real-time insights, a high-performance NoSQL KV store offering a reliable alternative to HBase, and vector hybrid search to support demanding generative AI and recommendation workloads efficiently.

As organizations increasingly rely on AI and hybrid workloads, the role of the database is more critical than ever. OceanBase is not just adapting to this shift but actively driving innovation, ensuring that businesses can seamlessly manage transactional, analytical, and AI-driven operations within a unified platform.

Image credit: iStockphoto/jullasart somdok