OceanBase 📖 Wikipedia

OceanBase is a native distributed relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Ant Group. It supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads, combining online transaction processing (OLTP) and real-time online analytical processing (OLAP). The system is highly compatible with MySQL and Oracle protocols and provides native support for multi-model data processing, including vector search. It began independent commercial operations in 2020 and is currently available in both an open-source Community Edition and a commercial Enterprise Edition.^[1][2][3][4]

The development of OceanBase was initiated internally at Alibaba in 2010, led by Dr. Yang Zhenkun. At the time, Alibaba was experiencing explosive business growth, and traditional centralized databases were facing significant challenges regarding scalability and cost. The research and development team originally aimed to build a highly scalable distributed database system capable of supporting massive data storage. In 2011, OceanBase version 0.3 was officially launched and first deployed in Taobao's "Favorites" feature, successfully addressing the challenges of real-time updates and queries for massive datasets. Subsequently, the system was gradually expanded to other internet business scenarios, such as Taobao's public image repository, which initially validated the reliability of its distributed architecture.^[5]

In 2014, as the architecture evolved to version 0.5, OceanBase integrated the Paxos consensus protocol, marking its achievement of financial-grade high availability. During the Singles' Day (Double 11) shopping festival that same year, OceanBase processed 10% of the traffic for Alipay's core transaction database, achieving a partial replacement of traditional commercial databases.^[6]

In 2015, Alipay entirely migrated its core accounting system to OceanBase, making it the world's first native distributed relational database applied to core financial operations. During the 2016 Singles' Day festival, OceanBase successfully withstood extreme traffic spikes, processing 100% of the payment traffic for the accounting database.  marked the completion of Alibaba's large-scale internal initiative to replace Oracle databases.^[7]

In 2017, OceanBase officially launched on Alibaba Cloud, beginning to offer commercial services to sectors such as finance and government; the Bank of Nanjing became its first external client. The release of version 2.0 in 2018 further optimized its multi-tenant architecture and improved system compatibility. In October 2019, OceanBase broke a nine-year record held by Oracle in the TPC-C international benchmark test organized by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), scoring 60.88 million tpmC and drawing widespread attention across the database industry.^[8][9]

In June 2020,  Ant Group announced the establishment of an independent entity, Beijing OceanBase Technology Co., Ltd., to operate the database business.^[5]

OceanBase is a distributed relational database system that implements an LSM-tree based storage engine to achieve high read and write performance.OceanBase incorporates a framework called MaLT (Manage Large Transactions) designed to efficiently handle large transactions within the system. The framework introduces a Transaction Context Table (TCT) and a Transaction Data Table (TDT) to manage transaction states in the LSM-tree based storage engine. ^[10]

Unlike existing LSM-tree based RDBMSs that abstract LSM-trees as key-value stores, MaLT directly implements transactions into the LSM-tree and leverages its unique features. The backfill (i.e., in-row version number update upon commit) and undo operations for transactions are seamlessly integrated into the compaction stage of the LSM-tree. MaLT also embeds transaction information directly within the LSM-tree, facilitating various optimizations to improve both read and write performance. ^[11][10]