Ningxia Unicom Historical Database Project — Low Investment, High Efficiency, Empowering Carriers in Western Provinces

Ningxia Unicom's existing system is based on a traditional architecture with Oracle, minicomputers, and storage. As business volume continues to grow, the current system's processing capacity and storage space are struggling to meet the demands of rapid business growth. Being located in western China, Ningxia Unicom is prudent with investments—simply adding more storage would result in very low cost-effectiveness for the overall system. The company urgently needs an expansion solution that can increase system storage, improve processing efficiency, and deliver high cost-effectiveness.

Ningxia Unicom's historical database stores long-term online historical data such as user bills and invoices, enabling users to quickly query their personal historical call details and billing information. With the continuous growth of user numbers and business volume, Ningxia Unicom requires: the historical database should feature a high compression ratio to store massive amounts of historical data; the system should offer high cost-effectiveness with low investment and high returns; and the system should have scalable capacity, supporting online expansion to minimize impact on user experience.

GBase 8a MPP Cluster was used to build Ningxia Unicom's historical data warehouse, leveraging efficient compression for long-term retention of historical data. In this case, the compression ratio of GBase 8a MPP Cluster was measured at 1:21.5, far higher than Oracle's 1:2. The business system directly outputs historical data as files, which are quickly loaded into GBase 8a MPP Cluster using its high-speed loading mechanism. On the upper layer, the historical data query application uses JDBC to connect directly to any node in the cluster, distributing query tasks across nodes to improve overall computational efficiency. Additionally, GBase 8a MPP Cluster fully implements the SQL92 standard, so the upper-layer applications require almost no changes—simply replacing the driver. Currently, the cluster has 4 nodes with 5TB of data.

Statistical analysis based on the historical data warehouse has achieved a qualitative leap. Compared with the original Oracle database, data loading and summarization speeds are 10 to 20 times faster, significantly improving application timeliness.

By adopting GBase 8a MPP Cluster, funds originally planned for capacity expansion can be reallocated to build a new, higher-performance database system, resulting in substantial cost savings—an important benefit for Ningxia Unicom in China’s western region.

High-Efficiency Compression:Compression ratio of 1:21.5, turning long-term offline data into instantly usable online data;

High Performance:Data loading and aggregation speeds are 10 to 20 times faster than traditional databases;

Standard Interfaces:GBase 8a MPP Cluster supports standard interfaces (JDBC/ODBC, C API, ADO.NET, etc.), allowing existing systems to run directly on it without any modifications;

Low Cost, High Efficiency:Leverages affordable x86 servers and Chinese-developed software, saving substantial investment;