OceanBase

Abstract

We have designed and developed OceanBase, a distributed relational database system from the very basics for a decade. Being a scale-out multi-tenant system, OceanBase is cross-region fault tolerant, which is based on the shared-nothing architecture. Besides sharing many similar goals with alternative distributed DBMS, such as horizontal scalability, fault-tolerance, etc., our design has been driven by the demands of typical RDBMS compatibility as well as both on-premise and off-premise deployments. OceanBase has fulfilled its design goal. It implements the salient features of certain mainstream classical RDBMS, and most applications on them can run on OceanBase, with or without a few minor modifications. Tens of thousands of OceanBase servers have been deployed in Alipay.com as well as many other commercial organizations. It has also successfully passed the TPC-C benchmark test and seized the first place with more than 707 million tpmC. This paper presents the goals, design criteria, infrastructure, and key components of OceanBase including its engines for storage and transaction processing. Further, it details how OceanBase achieves the above leading TPC-C benchmark in a distributed cluster with more than 1,500 servers from 3 zones. It also describes lessons what we have learnt in building OceanBase for more than a decade.