Who Rules the Database World? Insights from Tencent’s TVP Tech Forum

Background

The database industry has more than 40 years of evolution, spawning many product families and, in recent years, intense competition from domestic vendors. On March 8, 2020, Tencent Cloud organized a TVP technical closed‑door forum that brought MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL and CynosDB together for a technical debate.

MySQL 8.0

Wu Bingxi, co‑founder of Zhishutang, emphasized that while Oracle remains the undisputed king, MySQL 8.0 is the "king of open‑source databases". MySQL 8.0 introduces roughly 300 improvements over 5.7, covering optimizer, management, replication, plugins, security, development, and InnoDB. The feature set required more than 300,000 lines of new code for DDL rollback and data dictionary, and the development team exceeds 500 engineers.

"MySQL 8.0 compared with the familiar 5.7 version has nearly 300 enhancement points across seven major areas. If you think MySQL is hard to use, it’s simply because you are on an outdated version that is no longer supported by the official team."

The DB‑engine ranking places MySQL second only to Oracle.

Redis

Zhang Donghong, director of Extreme Cloud and chair of the Redis China User Group, described Redis as the NoSQL champion for high concurrency, low latency, and the backbone of modern internet applications. He highlighted Redis’s rich data structures and its pervasive use in scenarios such as red‑packet distribution, flash sales, and leaderboards.

Redis can serve both as a cache and a persistent KV store.

It is the easiest database to extend with custom functionality.

It natively supports the widest range of architectural patterns.

It can be used as a message queue.

It offers the simplest elastic scaling.

It provides the best memory management.

It supports loss‑less upgrades within seconds.

It has the greatest development potential.

"Redis’s rich data structures are a key reason it stands out; more than ten structures now underpin core internet services such as red‑packet distribution, flash sales, and leaderboards."

Cloud‑Native Databases (CynosDB)

Liu Feng, product lead of Tencent Cloud’s CynosDB, argued that cloud‑native databases represent the future of data management. He first listed the "seven sins" of traditional database architectures:

Poor scalability.

Low resource utilization.

Unreliable availability.

Unreliable reliability.

Performance bottlenecks.

Slow backup and restore.

High operational cost.

Traditional databases suffer because compute and storage are tightly coupled. CynosDB separates these layers, implementing a "log‑as‑database" architecture that pools storage resources and enables rapid elastic expansion. It modifies the InnoDB engine, builds a multi‑tenant shared distributed storage layer, and asynchronously merges logs. The result is a stateless compute tier that can scale, fail over, and snapshot within milliseconds.

CynosDB supports up to 128 TB of auto‑scaling storage, compute instances up to 96 CPU / 768 GiB, 100 % compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and sub‑millisecond inter‑node latency. It also offers instant read‑only node addition, fault‑tolerant failover, and snapshot backup.

"In 2022, 75 % of the world’s databases will run in the cloud, and cloud‑native databases will undoubtedly become the best choice for users."

PostgreSQL

Zhao Zhenping, CTO of Sun Tower Technology and chair of the PostgreSQL China community, called PostgreSQL "the strongest open‑source database". He highlighted its parallel query capabilities (parallel scan, parallel join, parallel append), performance comparable to Oracle, and a robust feature set that includes advanced indexing, GIS, and multi‑platform support.

"PostgreSQL’s community is a well‑organized fleet of global contributors, delivering continuous major releases and groundbreaking features year after year."

Other Perspectives

Li Yuesen, TBase lead, stressed that technology alone does not determine success; community management and ecosystem are equally critical.

Lin Xiaobin, Tencent Cloud database operations lead, explained that the key difference between cloud‑provided and self‑built database services lies not in cost but in elasticity, which helps enterprises handle traffic spikes and valleys.

Pan Anqun, TDSQL lead, concluded that no single "king" exists; multiple database technologies will coexist, with cloud‑native solutions shaping the future.

Conclusion

The debate ended with Wu Bingxi receiving the most votes, but the overarching message was clear: database selection should be driven by business scenarios, and cloud‑native databases are poised to dominate the next generation of data infrastructure.