How OceanBase Overtook Oracle: The 9‑Year Journey to TPC‑C World‑Record

Background and Early Challenges

In 2010, Oracle dominated the TPC‑C benchmark with a tpmC of over 30 million, a record that stood unchallenged for nine years. In 2011, Alibaba’s internal database team faced repeated crashes of the Taobao Favorites service during the Double‑11 shopping festival, prompting an urgent, all‑hands effort to fix the code.

The project, named OceanBase, was less than two years old when it first supported this critical workload. No one anticipated that nine years later OceanBase would surpass Oracle and claim the top spot on the TPC‑C leaderboard.

Setting the Goal

In August 2018, technical expert Zou Yinchao and the OceanBase team set a modest target: to beat Oracle’s record. The team realized that achieving this would require a massive performance uplift and a shift from physical machines to Alibaba Cloud ECS virtual machines, dramatically reducing hardware costs to about 18 % of Oracle’s.

Building the Test Infrastructure

To meet the stringent TPC‑C requirements—real‑world transaction simulation, a 2‑hour measurement window, and less than 2 % performance jitter—the team assembled a dedicated testing group. They consulted with hardware vendors, academia, and internal DBA teams, and built a custom testing tool that complied with the 100‑page English specification.

After months of preparation, the test plan was approved by the TPC‑C technical committee, clearing the first major hurdle.

Intensive Development and Cloud Migration

From 2019 onward, the team migrated the workload to a large‑scale Alibaba Cloud cluster, managing over 200 ECS instances. This cloud‑first approach was unprecedented for TPC‑C and cut hardware expenses dramatically while providing elastic scalability.

Continuous performance tuning, driven by daily “stand‑up” meetings and real‑time monitoring, gradually raised the performance curve, despite frequent stress‑induced hair loss and sleepless nights among engineers.

Final Audits and Record‑Breaking Results

In early August 2020, TPC‑C auditors arrived in Hangzhou. After a brief warm‑up period, OceanBase’s performance curve remained exceptionally smooth, with jitter under 0.5 %—far better than the 2 % limit. The final tpmC reached 60.88 million, more than twice Oracle’s record, and the results were published on the TPC‑C website.

Team members described the achievement as “expected” rather than celebratory, emphasizing that the real victory lay in proving that a Chinese‑developed, distributed database could compete at the highest global level.

Impact and Future Directions

The success opened new possibilities for the Chinese database market, demonstrating that cloud‑native, distributed architectures could outperform traditional monolithic systems. OceanBase now aims to add richer OLAP capabilities, support hybrid OLTP/OLAP workloads, and build a full ecosystem around its platform.

Additionally, Ant Financial plans to open‑source the testing tools used for the TPC‑C benchmark, making high‑quality performance testing more accessible to other companies.