OceanBase Database: The No.1 Distributed Database in the Financial Industry
On December 31, the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID) released its 2024 China Financial Industry Database Market Research Report. In the report, database vendors in the financial sector were rated in various dimensions, such as product mix, technological approaches, typical projects, and competencies. OceanBase was ranked as the leader holding the largest share of the distributed database market. In the banking, insurance, and securities submarkets, OceanBase also secured the top position with the highest overall score, making it the only distributed database vendor positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant in all the three submarkets.
As a core part of foundational software, databases have always been a focal point in building information systems in the financial industry. In 2023, China's financial database management system market maintained its rapid growth, reaching a value of CNY 6.79 billion, with a growth rate of 17.3%. It is estimated that by 2026, the market size will expand to CNY 11.26 billion.
In recent years, the distributed database market has been growing at an accelerated pace, driven by factors such as the maturing distributed database technology and increasingly stringent data security and compliance requirements. The report highlights that many financial institutions are upgrading their databases to distributed architectures to enhance database processing capabilities and scalability for large-scale business systems.
1. Distributed Databases: A Must-Have for Core Financial Systems
As technology matures, distributed databases have become the go-to choice for financial institutions due to their advantages in flexibility, scalability, high availability, and security. Their wide adoption in the financial industry has proven their value. Similarly, industries with high business complexity and heavy reliance on databases, such as telecommunications and transportation, are also accelerating their transformation, adopting distributed databases as a key technology for core system upgrades.
OceanBase Database, a native distributed database designed to handle Alipay's traffic peaks during the Double 11 shopping festival, has been honed over a decade in financial scenarios. Thanks to in-house technological innovations, OceanBase Database has achieved critical breakthroughs in auto-scaling, high availability, and multi-active disaster recovery, delivering exceptional performance to meet the digital needs of various financial institutions in different business scenarios.
In CCID's 2023 Core System Database Upgrade Selection Reference, OceanBase Database earned the highest score of 36.5, ranking first for future core system selections. Additionally, in its 2024 Practice Guide for Key Business System Database Upgrade, CCID recognized the native distributed architecture, represented by OceanBase Database, as the optimal path for key business system upgrades, and OceanBase Database gained a score of 4.15, the highest in the comprehensive evaluation of upgrade paths.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), a globally authoritative IT market research and consulting firm, China's distributed transactional database market is growing rapidly. Distributed transactional databases are expected to account for one-fifth of the relational database market.
2. Deep Expertise in Core Financial Scenarios: Safeguarding Key Business Systems
CCID identifies banking, insurance, and securities as the "three pillars" of the financial industry. They represent major application scenarios of databases. The CCID report notes that OceanBase Database has already reached the top sales of distributed databases in China's financial industry. OceanBase has secured its leading position in the banking, insurance, and securities submarkets, outperforming other vendors. It is the only distributed database vendor positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant in the all three submarkets.
Notably, an IDC report released in July 2024 indicates that, in the financial industry, the market size of distributed transactional databases had approached USD 200 million in 2023. OceanBase Database claimed a 17.1% market share, ranking first among independent database vendors. It also secured the top spot of local deployments in both the financial industry and the insurance and securities submarkets.
To enhance the disaster recovery capabilities of financial institutions, OceanBase Database pioneered the first disaster recovery architecture that consists of five internet data centers across three regions, setting a new standard for automatic lossless disaster recovery in case of city-wide failures. It achieves a recovery point objective (RPO) of 0 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 8 seconds, ushering the industry into the era of second-level fault recovery. Additionally, OceanBase Database ensures data security by adopting end-to-end encryption and supports Chinese ShangMi (SM) encryption algorithms.
To handle key business workloads, OceanBase Database V4.2.5 was released in 2024. This long-term support (LTS) version further enhances its online transaction processing (OLTP) performance in terms of high read/write performance, compatibility, and stability, as required by core systems. The test results show a 26% improvement in TP performance compared to the previous version. With the release of OceanBase Database V4.3.3, a General Availability (GA) version, OceanBase Database expanded its analytical processing (AP) capabilities on top of TP to meet real-time analytical needs.
So far, OceanBase Database serves all policy banks, five out of six state-owned major banks, over 20 banks with assets exceeding CNY 1 trillion, and nearly 100 banks with assets exceeding CNY 100 billion in China. In addition, 75% of top-tier securities firms, 70% of top-tier insurance companies, and 50% of top-tier fund companies have chosen OceanBase Database for their key business system upgrades, aiming to provide high-quality data services. Here, the top 20 in a sector are referred to as the top tier.
● Bank of Communications (BCM) partnered with OceanBase Database in 2022 to tackle key business system challenges and, being the first in China, succeeded in upgrading its core credit card system from a mainframe to a home-grown distributed architecture. Dozens of BCM's core business systems, such as its ECIF, debit card hosts, and accounting systems, were then migrated to OceanBase Database. After the migration, the system handles six times more transactions per second (TPS), with batch processing efficiency improved by seven times. The system now handles over 1 billion transactions every day. The distributed solution enables the bank to handle peak traffic with ease while improving O&M efficiency. Compared to the mainframe solution, the distributed solution saves over 15,000 MIPS resources, translating to about CNY 700 million.
● In the securities industry, OceanBase Database supported Guotai Junan Securities in upgrading over ten core business systems, including the institutional trading system, user system, account system, and clearing system. The company now runs dozens of systems on a 15-server cluster in an architecture comprising three internet data centers across two regions with greatly improved O&M efficiency. The resource utilization has more than doubled, and hardware costs have been substantially reduced.
● Based on reliability and cost-effectiveness considerations, Sunshine Insurance Group (SIG) chose OceanBase Database for its database upgrade, covering multiple core business systems, such as the property insurance, life insurance, and asset management systems. So far, SIG has built over 20 OceanBase clusters and replaced nearly 400 database instances for more than 200 business systems, slashing hardware resource costs by over 50% with the O&M workload being significantly relieved.
● In the second half of 2024, OceanBase Database helped Ping An Fund build a new-generation transfer agent (TA) system and has fully supported all its business systems, such as its self-built, listed open-ended fund (LOF), exchange-traded fund (ETF), and separately managed account systems. Running on the new database, the business systems have experienced higher operational efficiency. In particular, the clearing performance has increased by four times, reducing the time required for the daily business clearing from 2 hours to under 30 minutes.
Today, OceanBase serves over 2,000 customers, keeping a customer growth of higher than 100% over the last four years. It is rapidly expanding its service territory in the financial industry from core systems of top-tier companies to mid-tier ones, aiming to help more market players tackle their key business workloads.
Looking ahead, OceanBase will continue to deepen its technological innovations, hone its product capabilities, and assist more financial institutions in building modern data architectures, laying a solid foundation for the high-quality development of the financial industry.