DTCC Interview: GBase Cloud Logical Data Warehouse Drives Industry Digital Transformation and Upgrade

At the 12th China Database Technology Conference (DTCC 2021), Zhang Shaoyong, General Manager of the Data Intelligence Products Department at General Data Technology (GBase), was invited to give an interview on the topic “GBase Cloud Logical Data Warehouse Helps Industries Meet New Challenges in Digital Transformation.”

Host: Why did you choose the topic “GBase Cloud Logical Data Warehouse Helps Industries Meet New Challenges in Digital Transformation,” and what can the audience learn from it?

Zhang Shaoyong: The logical data warehouse addresses real-world challenges such as large data volumes, complex data types, and deep data value mining. Its core technologies—data virtualization and data federation—enable unified management of all business systems. With the evolution of cloud, adapting the existing functional architecture to changes in underlying infrastructure pushes the logical data warehouse to the cloud.

Host: Regarding cloud data warehouses, what can we learn from Snowflake?

Zhang Shaoyong: Snowflake’s strengths are its ease of use and flexible billing. Its concept of virtual data warehouses at the compute layer inspired us: GBase 8a MPP virtual clusters are physically separated but logically unified, with fault isolation, elastic scaling, and unified management for the entire cluster. General Data Technology foresaw this direction early on, building the GBase 8a MPP on-premises virtual data warehouse, and within half a year we migrated the compute from the original virtual clusters seamlessly to the cloud. Snowflake’s architectural approach to compute and its business model are worth learning from.

Host: What is the current demand for cloud data warehouses in China and abroad?

Zhang Shaoyong: In China, the key industries are finance and telecom. The financial sector includes large state-owned banks and joint-stock banks. For non-security and non-sensitive data, they first build private clouds to ensure security themselves, then gradually migrate to the cloud. General Data Technology is currently validating and adapting with a major state-owned bank on real business scenarios to drive implementation. Small and medium-sized city commercial banks are adopting industry public clouds, with shared storage and renting compute units on demand.

Host: Why are distributed databases suddenly gaining so much traction?

Zhang Shaoyong: Business drives technology. The concept emerged as needs evolved; the original single-machine analytical capabilities were insufficient for growing data volumes, driving proprietary solutions toward open architectures. When relational databases are transformed into a distributed architecture, they gain features like consistency, high availability, and scalability of distributed databases, while preserving the original relational database ecosystem, scale-out support, and transaction capabilities. They solve existing application scenarios without reducing compatibility, which fuels their growth. Transactional databases initially used database sharding and table partitioning, requiring middleware scheduling that necessitated application changes, eventually evolving into distributed transaction databases.

Host: Some say this is the best era for China’s homegrown databases. Do you agree?

Zhang Shaoyong: I agree. Current Chinese policies are promoting the development of China’s homegrown databases. Users’ attitudes toward Chinese databases have evolved from rejection to cautious adoption, then to production-ready deployment. After a decade of advancing homegrown databases, we are soon approaching the stage where they are truly “easy to use.”