OceanBase Distributed Relational Database Enables Insurance Business Innovation
The presentation outlines OceanBase's evolution, technical advantages such as high availability, scalability, performance, multi‑tenant HTAP capabilities, and its successful deployment in the insurance industry, demonstrating how a self‑developed distributed relational database can transform core financial services.
On August 26‑28, 2020, at the China Property Insurance Technology Application Summit, Ant Group’s senior solution architect Guo Yuanfei presented “OceanBase Distributed Relational Database Helps Insurance Business Innovation,” describing the evolution, value, and insurance‑industry best practices of OceanBase.
OceanBase was initiated in 2010, first serving Taobao Favorites, added SQL support in 2013, and powered all of Alipay’s transaction and core accounting systems from 2014‑2016. Since 2017 it has been offered to external customers such as Nanjing Bank, replacing traditional databases and MySQL in many financial core systems.
In 2019 OceanBase achieved 60.88 million tpmC in the TPC‑C benchmark, twice Oracle’s result; in 2020 it reached 707 million tpmC, reclaiming the top spot. In June 2020 OceanBase spun out as an independent company aiming to become a world‑leading enterprise data‑technology provider.
Traditional centralized databases used in finance and insurance suffer from high cost and poor scalability. Patch solutions that add SQL compatibility to single‑node open‑source databases cannot meet the reliability, ACID guarantees, and scalability required by core financial systems.
OceanBase offers a fully self‑developed distributed relational database that delivers high availability through Paxos and multi‑replica technology (RPO = 0, RTO < 30 s), linear scalability to over 100 nodes per cluster, world‑class performance (up to 61 million ops/s, 3.2 billion rows per table), and low cost by running on commodity X86 servers.
Its “five‑high‑one‑many” design provides high availability, high scalability, high performance, high transparency (global snapshots, global indexes, two‑phase commit), and high compatibility (simultaneous Oracle and MySQL ecosystems), as well as multi‑tenant capabilities that allow many isolated instances on a single cluster.
OceanBase supports both OLTP and OLAP workloads, delivering a true HTAP engine that can run transactional and analytical workloads on the same cluster.
Deployment options include on‑premise license, private‑cloud integration with Alibaba Cloud services, or public‑cloud RDS offering, with flexible disaster‑recovery configurations ranging from same‑room three‑replica to multi‑region five‑center architectures.
In the insurance sector, OceanBase powers the People’s Insurance “Good Health Insurance” product on Alipay, boosting daily policy issuance to ~150 k, increasing processing capacity by thousands of times, reducing a 4‑hour batch to 6 minutes, cutting new‑product launch time by over 80 %, and improving third‑party channel integration efficiency six‑fold.
The speaker concluded by inviting further collaboration to use OceanBase for future insurance‑industry core systems.
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