Applying OceanBase Financial‑Grade Distributed Database at Net Business Bank: Architecture, Migration, and High‑Availability Practices

This article, compiled from a 2019 Big Data Industry Summit presentation by Ant Financial technology expert Yang Xianghe, introduces Net Business Bank’s practical experience with the financial‑grade distributed database OceanBase.

Facing requirements for low cost, high availability, high elasticity, and strict regulatory compliance, Net Business Bank selected OceanBase as its core database and built China’s first cloud‑based internet bank.

OceanBase combines classic relational‑database and distributed‑system techniques, offering multi‑tenant isolation, strong consistency via Paxos, horizontal scalability, high performance, and broad compatibility that eases migration.

The logical architecture follows a Share‑Nothing design with multi‑region, multi‑replica clusters; at least three replicas are deployed, guaranteeing strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and automatic disaster recovery.

Since the upgrade to OceanBase 1.0, the logical schema expanded from 5 databases/10 tables to 100 databases/100 tables, enabling 100 logical units across many data centers to meet exponential financial‑business growth.

The OceanBase Migration Service (OMS) provides a one‑stop solution for database split, version upgrade, and migration, achieving minute‑level cutover with fine‑grained impact control.

Elastic data source technology delivers high‑availability and elasticity for streaming workloads by routing traffic across multiple physical database groups, allowing failover and seamless switching within seconds.

Physically, the bank evolved from a two‑site three‑center to a three‑site five‑center deployment, achieving city‑level disaster tolerance, multi‑active operations across cities, and resource isolation through multi‑tenant capabilities.

Cost‑reduction measures include separating cold (SATA) and hot (SSD) data, and using read‑only historical databases to lower storage and backup expenses.

Looking forward, the bank aims to leverage intelligent scheduling and integrated perspectives of business, application, architecture, data, and resources to further advance distributed‑database capabilities, supporting strategic goals and continuous service in the financial sector.