Financial's OceanBase, a new distributed relational database, had doubled its performance record by 11 times in just 6 months.

Criticism and Questioning of Ant Financial’s OceanBase Potential

After Ant Financial's OceanBase became the world champion, doubts followed.

It was pointed out that Oracle's performance data is nine years old and does not reflect subsequent hardware improvements. Others point out that in 2013, Oracle achieved a performance score of 8 million tmpC (transactions per minute) on a single workstation and could build a cluster of up to 27 workstations. In other words, Oracle Text can reach performance scores of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of tmpCs.

This took the wind out of the team's sails. Yang Zhenkun, the founder of Ant Financial Services OceanBase, frowned and said, "I think we have to try again."

In May 2020, Ant Financial OceanBase conducted the TPC-C benchmark test for the second time, and finally finished the competition with a tpmC score of 707 million, setting a new record and increasing by 11.6 times compared to last year. Compared with investing a lot of resources in the test last year, this time only two teams from Hangzhou and Beijing were involved. The experts worked day and night and successfully passed the second test. In the words of Cao Hui, a technical expert of Ant Financial's OceanBase team, it is because "we have gone through twists and turns and come to the other side."

Ant Financial's OceanBase Slow Rise

Ten years ago, today's grand victories were a distant fantasy. In fact, when Alibaba launched the project to develop its proprietary distributed relational database, the team got off to a rocky start. In 2010, when Yang Zhenkun proposed to independently develop such a database, almost everyone questioned its feasibility.