The Journey of OceanBase: From a Dream to World‑Record Distributed Relational Database

In November 2014, Sun Zhenkun, founder of OceanBase, rallied his team before the Double‑11 shopping festival, promising that if the system failed they would "jump out the window." The next day, OceanBase announced a new TPC‑C record of 7.07 billion tpmC, surpassing its previous 60.88 million tpmC result.

One year earlier, OceanBase had broken Oracle’s nine‑year world record, becoming the first Chinese database on the TPC‑C leaderboard. From a near‑dissolution to two world‑first rankings, Sun and his team spent a decade building millions of lines of code into a resilient database foundation.

In 2010, Sun joined Taobao at the invitation of partner Liu Zhenfei and chose to develop a self‑built distributed database rather than rely on traditional systems that suffered from long provisioning cycles and limited scalability.

Traditional databases could not keep up with the rapid traffic spikes of e‑commerce, leading Sun to envision a distributed relational database that could partition data across ten machines, each handling 100 GB, to support billions of daily transactions.

With support from Alibaba Cloud’s founding father Dr. Wang Jian, Sun explored distributed systems while at Microsoft Research Asia, eventually forming a small team that named the project "OceanBase" to evoke an ocean‑sized database.

The first real‑world test came with Taobao’s "Favorites" feature, whose legacy database could not handle the load. After two months of prototyping and eight months of development, OceanBase was deployed, reducing the required server count from hundreds to just over twenty.

Facing possible team dissolution in 2012, Sun sought advice from Dr. Wang Jian, who suggested moving the team to Alipay, where the need for a high‑availability database was even greater.

In 2013, Ant Financial’s CTO Cheng Li pushed for a full replacement of Oracle with OceanBase. Version 0.5 introduced multi‑copy data replication, ensuring transaction durability without expensive shared storage.

During the 2014 Double‑11 event, OceanBase was entrusted with 1 % of the transaction flow, later expanding to 10 % as Oracle faltered, proving its reliability under massive load.

Subsequent milestones include OceanBase 1.0 supporting 120 k payments per second in Alipay, the 2017 record of 42 million operations per second, and the 2019 and 2020 TPC‑C world‑record achievements, cementing its status as a leading distributed relational database.

Beyond performance, the story highlights the culture of code craftsmanship, teamwork, and perseverance that drove OceanBase from a risky startup project to a globally recognized database solution.