GoldenDB: High‑Performance Distributed Database Powering Financial Services

1. GoldenDB Introduction

GoldenDB is a distributed database jointly developed by ZTE and CITIC Bank, built on the PGXC architecture. It adds sharding clusters and compute nodes to achieve strong consistency in distributed scenarios.

Clients access the database cluster through load balancing. Requests pass through compute nodes for syntax analysis, SQL optimization, execution plan generation, and finally are dispatched to the appropriate shard nodes (data nodes).

Compute node main functions:

Front‑end long‑connection management, port management, SQL protocol handling, flow control;

SQL parsing: syntax checking and abstract syntax tree generation;

SQL query optimization;

SQL execution;

SQL routing: data module selection, load balancing, and routing management;

SQL protocol encapsulation, back‑end long‑connection management, load balancing.

Data nodes store data and execute transactions. Each data node can be an independent database system, with business data distributed according to compute node results.

Similar to a monolithic database, a data node includes connector, analyzer, optimizer, executor, and data files. To ensure high availability, each data node has at least one backup.

Distributed transactions require a transaction coordinator. GoldenDB’s global transaction manager maintains a list of active distributed transactions, managing their full lifecycle (create, commit, rollback) and providing status queries for data nodes.

Public message handling: heartbeat with compute nodes, reporting transaction status, handling metadata;

Global transaction message handling: processing global transaction and SEQUENCE requests;

GTID handling: request, query, release of global transaction IDs;

SEQUENCE handling: creation and modification of SEQUENCE objects;

CTID handling: request, query, release of transaction identifiers.

The management node offers operational capabilities through several modules: Insight (unified monitoring and analysis platform), MetaDataServer (metadata management), ProxyManager (compute node management), OMM (unified operations and maintenance platform), and ClusterManager (cluster management, including high‑availability, backup‑restore, and data redistribution).

2. Features

Strong Consistency: Essential for financial accounting, GoldenDB uses a global transaction manager to coordinate distributed transactions, providing ACID guarantees with performance superior to monolithic databases.

Flexible Sharding Technology: Supports hash, range, list, and composite sharding methods.

High Performance & Scalability: Demonstrates over 10× performance compared to traditional centralized databases, with linear scalability as physical nodes increase.

SQL Compatibility: Fully compatible with MySQL syntax and also supports common Oracle and DB2 syntax, distributed stored procedures, global unique indexes, and MVCC.

Read/Write Separation: Dynamically routes write operations to the primary node and balances read operations across replicas.

Data High Reliability & Service High Availability: Multi‑region, multi‑center deployment ensures RPO=0 and employs a majority‑based protocol for ordered master‑slave failover.

Comprehensive Toolset: Provides end‑to‑end migration and operational solutions, including automated installation, monitoring, inspection, scaling, heterogeneous database conversion, data migration, and real‑time bidirectional synchronization.

Smooth Migration: Robust migration tools enable data migration and real‑time synchronization for seamless transition.

High Performance Benchmarks: In large‑scale banking scenarios (300 million users, 1.5 billion accounts), GoldenDB achieved 40 000 TPS; in credit‑card core workloads, it sustained millions of TPS.