This topic describes the core features of OceanBase Database.
Distributed transaction engine
The distributed transaction engine of OceanBase Database supports the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) properties of transactions and provides strong data consistency in the entire cluster. It is the only native distributed relational database in the world that passes the TPC-C benchmark test.
OceanBase Database creates multiple replicas for transaction logs based on Paxos. This ensures the availability and persistence of transactions.
Transparent and scalable
OceanBase Database provides an innovative architecture with the root service and partition service for load balancing. This ensures extremely high scalability. OceanBase Database allows you to perform smooth online scaling and automatically balances the system load after scaling. This process is transparent to applications and does not interrupt your business.
In addition, OceanBase Database can dynamically scale a single mega cluster that contains more than 1,500 nodes, more than 3 petabytes of total data, and more than a trillion rows in one table. In the TPC-C benchmark test, OceanBase Database can achieve a scaling ratio of 1:0.9. This can help you maximize the return on your hardware investment.
Extreme high availability
OceanBase Database uses a shared-nothing (SN) architecture with multiple replicas to ensure zero single point of failure and system continuity. OceanBase Database provides the high availability and disaster recovery features at the node, IDC, and region levels. It supports the following deployment modes: single-IDC deployment, dual-IDC deployment, three IDCs across two regions, and five IDCs across three regions. Test results show that OceanBase Database reaches a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 30 seconds. This is equivalent to Level 6 disaster recovery capability, which is the highest level in the international disaster recovery capabilities standard.
OceanBase Database provides flexible high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities by using log-based data replication between primary and secondary databases. The primary cluster sends transaction logs to the standby cluster to synchronize data. This ensures that the business can rapidly recover if the primary cluster encounters data damage or a disaster. When the primary cluster of an OceanBase Database becomes unavailable unexpectedly or as scheduled, a standby cluster will become the primary cluster. This can ensure system continuity and minimize downtime.
In addition, OceanBase Database allows you to back up data blocks and transaction logs for recovery. This also ensures high availability.
HTAP
The innovative distributed computing engine of OceanBase Database allows multiple nodes to run online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) applications at the same time. This can maximize database utilization.
OceanBase Database uses one computing engine to support hybrid load balancing so that you can use only one system to resolve 80% of your needs. This makes OceanBase Database superior to distributed databases that use two types of computing engines or even two types of database systems to support both OLTP and OLAP.
Multi-tenancy
OceanBase Database adopts an architecture that is designed for the cloud. OceanBase Database supports multi-tenancy in one cluster. It also supports various deployment modes, such as public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud deployment.
OceanBase Database achieves resource isolation by separating tenants. Database instances do not affect each other. OceanBase Database uses permission control to ensure the data security of all tenants. Combined with the extreme scalability, OceanBase Database can provide you with a secure and flexible database-as-a-service (DBaaS) service.
High compatibility
OceanBase Database supports Oracle and MySQL, which are the two most widely-used database ecosystems.
OceanBase Database supports all the syntax of MySQL 5.6. Business can be seamlessly switched between MySQL and OceanBase Database.
OceanBase Database also supports the vast majority of Oracle syntax and almost all PL/SQL features. Most Oracle workloads can automatically migrate to OceanBase Database with a few modifications. OceanBase Database has landed in multiple finance enterprises in China and multiple internal systems of Alibaba Cloud.
Complete intellectual property rights
OceanBase Database is developed fully in-house by Ant Group. It is not based on open-source databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. OceanBase Database is autonomous, controllable, and free from the technical limits of open-source databases.
High performance
OceanBase Database provides in-memory databases where data manipulation happens in the memory. OceanBase Database uses a proprietary storage engine that is based on LSM Tree. This storage engine requires low hardware performance and well exceeds traditional relational databases in both read and write performance.
Security
The security features of OceanBase Database are designed based on the security requirement study on a large number of enterprises and various security standards. OceanBase Database can meet the vast majority of security requirements of enterprises. It provides a complete permission and role system and supports features such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), transparent data encryption, auditing, Label Security, and the IP address whitelist. OceanBase Database is rated Level 3 in the evaluation of Classified Protection of Cybersecurity of China.
Compatibility with products from Chinese manufacturers
OceanBase Database supports products from Chinese manufacturers in full stack. OceanBase Database can work on physical servers from Chinese manufacturers including Sugon H620 series, TaiShan 200 series, and Great Wall Optimus DF720. OceanBase Database is also adaptive to CPUs including Hygon 7185/7280, Kunpeng 920, and FeiTeng 2000+. In addition, OceanBase Database supports operating systems from Chinese manufacturers, such as Kylin V4, Kylin V10, and UOS V20. OceanBase Database is also adaptive to upper layer middleware including TongWeb V7.0 and Apusic Application Server V9.0.