OceanBase: A Revolutionary Distributed Relational Database from Alibaba/Ant Financial

In 2008, after leaving Microsoft Research Asia, Wang Jian joined Alibaba as chief architect and proposed the "去IOE" (eliminate IOE) strategy to move away from reliance on IBM mainframes, Oracle databases, and EMC storage.

From 2009 onward, Alibaba invested heavily in cloud computing, and in 2010 Yang Zhenkun joined the team, leading the development of OceanBase, a home‑grown distributed relational database designed to replace commercial databases.

Key milestones include the decommissioning of the last IBM mainframe in 2013, the migration of Oracle databases in Alibaba’s advertising and payment systems to OceanBase, and the complete removal of IOE components from Ant Financial by 2017.

OceanBase demonstrated its performance during Double 11 shopping festivals, handling 120,000 transactions per second in 2016 and 256,000 per second in 2017, supported by a dedicated team of dozens of engineers.

The database earned recognition at the 2016 World Internet Conference alongside companies such as Tesla, IBM, and Microsoft, and its team received the prestigious "CEO Award" (gold‑colored badge) for achieving high availability and low cost at massive scale.

Since 2017, OceanBase has been commercialized, serving financial platforms like Nanjing Bank’s "XinYun+" and expanding to markets in India and the United States.

Technically, OceanBase is a distributed relational database that differs from traditional single‑node databases by storing each data piece on three separate machines, using the Paxos consensus algorithm to ensure strong consistency and automatic leader election when failures occur.

Its architecture emphasizes high availability, strong consistency, ease of use, high performance, scalability, and low cost. It achieves these goals through a native distributed design, a semi‑in‑memory statistics collection mechanism, and full compatibility with MySQL, allowing seamless migration without code changes.

The development process involved rigorous testing, fault‑injection frameworks, code reviews, and close collaboration between developers, operations, and business teams via real‑time communication channels.

OceanBase’s success is attributed to strong executive support, a clear product roadmap aligned with major events like Double 11, and a culture that encourages rapid iteration, thorough post‑mortems, and knowledge sharing.

Today, OceanBase stands as China’s first independently owned distributed relational database, challenging the dominance of commercial databases in the financial sector and illustrating the power of large‑scale, cloud‑native, open‑source‑compatible database technology.