Database Technology Development and Future Directions: From Commercial Databases to Cloud-Native Era

This article discusses the evolution and future of database technology, presented by Gu Guoqiang, CEO of Cloud and Enmo and Tencent Cloud TVP, at the Techo TVP Developer Summit.

Three Major Trends in the Database Industry:

1. Entering a New Database Era: The development has progressed through three phases - commercial database era (represented by Oracle), open-source era (represented by MySQL), and the new database era. While some call it the "cloud database era," the author prefers "new" because the Chinese market shows different development patterns. In the new era, cloud has become the most important battlefield for databases, with Microsoft surpassing Oracle globally, and Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Huawei Cloud leading in China.

2. Database as the Ultimate Battle on Cloud: After building IaaS layer, the next challenge is solving database problems at the PaaS layer. The author cites AWS's 2019 achievement of replacing 7,500 Oracle databases, noting that traditional DBA work (database scaling, storage expansion, license negotiation) can now be automated through cloud self-service.

3. toB Market is Key to Database Success: In China, public cloud and hybrid cloud will coexist long-term, with private cloud maintaining significant market share. The trend is "cloud experience on-premise" - bringing public cloud's best user experience and automation to private deployments.

Academic Perspectives:

The article reviews Turing Award winners in database field: Charles Bachmann (network database), Edgar Codd (relational database), Jim Gray (transaction theory), Michael Stonebraker (industrial implementation), and Jeffrey Ullman (2021, known for the "Dragon Book"). The author suggests relational database theory may be reaching its limits, but there's potential for revival through new innovations.

Oracle's Evolution:

Oracle's key milestones include: Oracle8i (internet version, 1998), Oracle9i (clustering, 2004), Oracle10g (automated storage management), Oracle11g (appliance products), Oracle12c (distributed architecture), Oracle18c (sharded clustering), Oracle19c (intelligent indexing), Oracle20c (persistent memory). Oracle only missed one thing - cloud computing.

Domestic Database Evolution (TDSQL):

TDSQL started in 2012. Key achievements include WeBank (micro-bank) handling 600 million daily transactions with 100,000 TPS. Technical innovations include strong data consistency (synchronous replication between primary and replicas), automated monitoring for 10,000+ nodes, and one-primary-three-standby mode with second-level fault switching.

Five Future Directions:

1. Distributed: Elastic scaling and self-healing capabilities 2. Intelligent: AI applications like intelligent indexing 3. Multi-model: Unified interface for various data types 4. Hardware-software Integration: Database optimization at CPU level 5. Cloud Convergence: Unified experience between cloud and on-premise

The author concludes that DBAs should not fear obsolescence - data will become increasingly important as core enterprise assets, database operations require full-stack skills, and expertise in Oracle/MySQL can transition to domestic database product design and development.