OceanBase

OceanBase is a distributed, scalable, shared-nothing relational DBMS developed by Alibaba. The goal of OceanBase is to serve for financial scenarios which is demanding on performance, cost, scalability and requires database with high availability and strong consistency. It is designed and optimized for diverse OLTP applications on relational structured data, though its shared-nothing structure also supports OLAP applications well.

History

In 2010, OceanBase team leader Zhenkun Yang joined Alibaba. Because of the increasing concurrency in Alibaba's business and the shortened development cycle to build a database for new transaction, Yang found that original DBMS can't support for rapidly growing workloads in Alibaba. He decided to abandon the traditional DBMS framework and develop a novel DBMS from scratch. At the very beginning, he presented three kernel principles for their new products: (1) distributed (2) low cost (3) high reliability.
In 2013, Alipay decided to abandon Oracle. Since MySQL can't ensure strong consistency between active server and standby server, OceanBase got its first opportunity. From now on, OceanBase is not open sourced anymore. From 2014 to 2016, this team spend three years developing OceanBase 1.0. It is the first and only commercial DBMS which supports distributed transactions.
From 2017, OceanBase started to serve for external customers.
In 2019, OceanBase beat Oracle and won the first place in TPC-C test.

System Architecture

Shared-Nothing

Storage Architecture

Disk-oriented

Query Interface

SQL

Storage Organization

Heaps

Data Model

Relational

OceanBase Logo
Website

https://oceanbase.alipay.com/

Source Code

https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase

Tech Docs

https://oceanbase.alipay.com/docs

Developer

Alibaba

Country of Origin

CN

Start Year

2013

Project Type

Commercial

Written in

C++

Compatible With

MySQL

Operating Systems

Hosted, Linux

Licenses

GPL v2