The firm that’s improving database management for digital services like Alipay, GCash

Back in 2010, Ant Group was seeing its business grow rapidly, but the company was also in a conundrum.

Alipay – the tech major’s digital payments app – was thriving, with more than 500 million registered users making daily transactions of around US$376 million (2.6 billion yuan).

Photo credit: Ant Group

With the app leading China’s e-wallet space, ecommerce events like Singles’ Day naturally translated into millions of transactions processed via Alipay. In turn, this meant the firm’s database was receiving scores of queries – far more than it could handle.

A query works by sending a message to the system, instructing it to take an action such as retrieving a piece of information to process a transaction. Because Alipay’s database was built on a common monolithic structure, it faced regular bottlenecks, including occasional downtimes on various services and an inability to deal with a high volume of queries all at once.

The system simply wasn’t built to handle large volumes of transactions at the same time, and scaling this database would be challenging, expensive, and operationally intensive.

A failure to address this problem could cost Ant Group up to billions in lost revenue.

Finding a fix

The tech conglomerate got to work and developed OceanBase, a relational database management solution (RDBMS) capable of handling a high volume of online transactions and database queries simultaneously. An RDBMS can store, retrieve, and make sense of different programs within a system.

Thanks to this solution, Alipay was able to process 61 million queries per second and reduce downtime on its platform, enabling seamless transactions even during major sales events.

OceanBase was further deployed across Ant Group’s ecosystem of companies and partners. However, this was only part of a bigger story – one that went beyond the tech major.

“The problems we were tackling weren’t unique to Alipay. Even today, many companies face similar issues with their databases,” observes Eric Lim, general manager of OceanBase Asia Pacific.

Eric Lim, general manager of OceanBase Asia Pacific / Photo credit: OceanBase

He cites three pain points for businesses whose databases run on a monolithic structure: scalability, high costs, and availability. The latter refers to the ease with which users can access and use a platform, whether it’s an app or otherwise.

“High availability means a better customer experience. It can prevent opportunity loss,” Lim explains.

He adds that a monolithic database typically operates on two nodes: write and read. If one node goes offline, the app that it’s supporting could face downtime issues.

Virtually boundless

As a point of difference, OceanBase runs on three nodes to ensure that data remains accessible, even in the event of hardware failure or other disruptions.

This means that even if one node goes offline, OceanBase can still perform its basic functions. Its recovery time of eight seconds or less is “one of the best” in the industry, Lim says.

For online businesses with high transaction rates, having the right database can make all the difference in managing and processing large volumes of data across multiple servers.

For instance, OceanBase has helped Trip.com maintain its high availability rate, which is especially important for the online travel aggregator to accommodate web traffic spikes during its sales events.

Another key differentiating factor for the OceanBase is its multitenant architecture with storage capabilities. Essentially, each part of an application – also known as a tenant – is stored within one shared environment yet separated by logic.

Photo credit: dragoscondrea / 123RF

The entire software runs on one server but serves multiple tenants, Lim adds.

OceanBase can also consolidate multiple databases and use its own compression technology to reduce a client’s storage needs by up to 90%.

These are some reasons why the OceanBase system can handle near-unlimited scaling for businesses of all sizes and growth stages, Lim shares. An app would be able to effectively scale its operations based on business growth without compromising on the user experience.

Ziel Home, for example, credits OceanBase for helping it to scale its database on demand. As a result, the online furniture retailer was able to handle a sharp increase in queries during events like Black Friday and Singles’ Day.

The same was true for Gcash, Philippines’ leading e-wallet provider.

Prior to working with Oceanbase, it faced a bottleneck in the scalability of its database. Engineers had to work overnight to clean data and address issues resulting from database sharding – that is, when an application separates information from one data set across multiple databases, potentially leading to lost or corrupted data.

After migrating to OceanBase, GCash was able to ensure business continuity no matter what happened in the backend. It also saw its database operating costs fall by 40% and was able to eliminate occurrences of database sharding.

Embracing change

Lim notes that businesses have typically been geographically bound to their respective cloud providers. For example, a business using a Singapore-based cloud provider would be limited by the countries in which it operates. Digital businesses aiming to play on the international stage would need to work with multiple cloud providers across different regions.

Since OceanBase is platform-agnostic, its clients were able to expand their databases by employing multiple cloud or on-premise infrastructures – Oracle DB and MySQL included.

For the shorter term, our goal is to be a database partner for all digital companies.

“Because of OceanBase’s architecture, companies can now use less hardware to maintain their database. This means lower operational and storage costs across the board,” Lim explains.

The database provider is continuing to pave the way for change in an age-old industry. In 2021, it released an open-source, community version of its database software on GitHub, allowing the code-hosting platform’s members to expand on OceanBase’s existing architecture.

Embracing an open-source culture was just the first step.

Lim reveals that OceanBase is working to transform into a hybrid transactional/analytical processing database – one that can support large-scale online transaction processing and a real-time analytics workload.

The latter would be a boon to businesses: an analytics workload can make sense of data in real time, such as matching a piece of information to a customer’s needs. Overall, this would lead to improved performance and uptime for businesses.

“For the shorter term, our goal is to be a database partner for all digital companies, from small users to larger firms operating on more complex architecture,” Lim concludes.

Currency converted from yuan to US dollar: US$1 = 6.91 yuan.

OceanBase is a platform-agnostic database management solution that is highly compatible with Oracle DB and MYSQL. It’s available as a managed service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, Alibaba Cloud, or OceanBase Cloud, and as a software subscription on all other platforms.

Claim your free 30-day trial of OceanBase Cloud. To learn more, visit the OceanBase booth at Tech in Asia’s Product Development Conference in Jakarta, Indonesia on May 16 and 17, 2023 or check out its website .

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This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.