China Database Industry Report: Trends, Market Landscape, and Domestic Vendors

Global database industry trends include the continued dominance of relational databases, the gradual rise of non‑relational (NoSQL) databases, the emergence of cloud vendors' self‑developed databases, the growing importance of open‑source solutions, and the development of multi‑model databases to meet complex application scenarios.

Domestic database vendors in China benefit from three key opportunities: the "Xinchuang" strategy promoting a domestic ecosystem, the big‑data era driving high‑concurrency and unstructured data processing needs, and major cloud providers entering the database market, which together erode the traditional monopoly of international giants.

Databases are a core component of software infrastructure alongside operating systems and middleware; selecting the appropriate database critically affects application performance, scalability, flexibility, and reliability.

Databases can be classified by data structure (relational vs. non‑relational) and by function (operational/transactional vs. analytical). Relational databases, built on the SQL language, include Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and others, and still hold the majority of market share. Non‑relational databases, often referred to as NoSQL, offer easier horizontal scaling and flexibility for unstructured data but sacrifice strong consistency.

China's domestic database landscape features the traditional "old four" vendors—Dameng, Kingbase, GBase, and ShenZhou—and newer giants such as Alibaba's OceanBase and Huawei's GaussDB. While facing pressure from established international players, these companies gain momentum from open‑source growth, cloud migration, and AI‑driven demand.

In summary, the rise of big data and artificial intelligence increases demand for high‑concurrency, flexible, and unstructured‑data‑handling capabilities; cloud providers' self‑developed databases and the expanding open‑source ecosystem challenge legacy monopolies, creating significant opportunities for the development of domestic database technologies.