GBase Database Lays the Foundation for China's IT Innovation in Rail Transit

China is the world's largest urban rail transit market. Statistics show that 45 cities in mainland China have operational urban rail transit lines, with a total network length of 7,978 kilometers. In recent years, the GBase family of databases has contributed to the digitalization of dozens of urban rail lines across more than 20 cities—including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shenyang, Chongqing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Jinan, Changsha, Hefei, Lanzhou, Hohhot, Kunming, Nanning, Dalian, Suzhou, Shaoxing, Xuzhou, Ningbo, and Jinhua. GBase has laid a solid foundation for the domestic replacement of legacy systems in smart urban rail transit, supporting AFC, clearing, integrated supervision, line network command centers, and data centers.

GBase in Urban Rail Transit

Domestic Database for AFC Systems

The Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) system leverages computer, communication, network, and automatic control technologies to automate ticket selling, ticket checking, fare calculation, revenue collection, statistics, clearing, and management. A metro AFC system enables automated ticketing, offers flexible payment methods and management tools, and provides passenger flow and revenue analysis for data-driven operational decisions. As an essential part of a comprehensive urban rail automation system, AFC is a key indicator of a city's transit digitalization level. Driven by localization requirements, an increasing number of rail transit AFC systems are choosing the GBase domestic database to replace legacy Oracle databases.

Domestic Database for Clearing Systems

The AFC Clearing Center (ACC) enables "one-ticket transfer" across a rail network. As the top-level management center of the network-wide AFC system, ACC plays a critical role—serving as the ticketing management center, clearing and settlement center, ticket management center, and the hub for technical standards and rule-making. It also handles system-wide data statistics, analysis, and distribution.

The ACC carries out network-wide management functions for the entire ticketing system. It governs the entire city's rail transit AFC ticketing model, setting and publishing network fares, monitoring network-level operations, and managing network-level parameters—making it a core system of the urban rail network. To meet localization demands, more and more ACC systems are migrating from Oracle to the GBase domestic database.

Domestic Database for Integrated Supervision Systems

The Integrated Supervision and Control System (ISCS) is a large-scale automation platform tailored to the characteristics of a transit line and technology evolution. ISCS enables information sharing and resource pooling across urban rail transit, improving automation levels, operational safety, reliability, and responsiveness—ultimately reducing costs and boosting efficiency. By integrating key low-voltage subsystems into a unified monitoring and management platform, ISCS provides centralized monitoring and control of critical electrical and mechanical equipment. This panoramic view allows correlation of train operations and passenger flow data, information sharing, and coordinated interaction among systems, helping operations managers conveniently, efficiently, and in real time oversee the entire line. Driven by localization needs, more ISCS projects are selecting GBase as the replacement for legacy Oracle databases.

Domestic Database for Network Command Centers

The Network Command Center (NCC) is an integrated center for operational monitoring and coordination, emergency command during incidents, operational information collection and distribution, and data analytics for the entire rail transit network. Leveraging the ACC/PCC business platform and other systems, and aligned with network operations management, emergency response, and decision-analysis requirements, NCC collects, stores, analyzes, mines, applies, and displays data on network-wide fundamentals, train movements, passenger flow, vehicles, power supply, critical electromechanical equipment, video feeds, major risk projects, omnimedia alerts, the 110 coordination platform, and operational incidents. To fulfill localization requirements, more network command systems are migrating to the GBase domestic database.

Results and Value

Meeting the requirements of rail transit projects in over 20 cities: GBase databases deliver the stability, functionality, performance, and cluster architecture that business demands—matching expectations for system availability, response time, scalability, security, and concurrency in rail transit digitalization.

Realizing a self-controlled technology strategy: GBase sets a strong example for the rail transit sector by advancing the "Remove IOE" initiative, accelerating the implementation of secure and self-controlled domestic regulation, and promoting the evolution of industry technology architecture.

A fully compatible OLTP and OLAP domestic database: GBase supports all domestic operating systems, chips, servers, and storage, 100% fulfilling the full-stack domestic system requirements of rail transit customers and providing robust data security for mission-critical systems.

Comprehensive cost and service advantages: Choosing GBase reduces procurement costs while significantly contributing to the performance of rail transit information platforms and enhancing the technical skills of operations and maintenance personnel.

Building a complete industry ecosystem for domestic technology: While delivering products with superior price-performance, we offer custom development to make products more mature and aligned with actual business needs. On top of maintaining processing efficiency for business systems, this provides excellent business scalability and improves overall system security.

About General Data Technology

Tianjin General Data Technology Co., Ltd., founded in 2004 and designated as a Key Software Enterprise within the national planning framework, is dedicated to database software products and services. Its mission is to become the most trusted database provider. Since its inception, the company has consistently focused on the R&D and promotion of domestic databases, serving over 10,000 users in finance, telecommunications, transportation, government, enterprises, and institutions.

GBase 8s is a shared-storage database cluster independently developed by General Data Technology with proprietary intellectual property rights. It meets the security database Level 4 standard (equivalent to B2 under international criteria), supports national cryptographic algorithms, and complies with international database specifications and development interfaces such as SQL92/99, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, GCI (OCI/OCCI), and Python. It supports distributed, centralized, shared-storage high-availability, and geo-redundant two-site/three-center high-availability deployments. Featuring high capacity, high concurrency, and high performance, GBase 8s provides a cost-effective general-purpose computing platform for ultra-large-scale data management, suited for OLTP scenarios, including core banking and telecom systems, as well as systems with strict information security requirements.

GBase 8a MPP Cluster is a Shared-Nothing distributed parallel database cluster independently developed by General Data Technology with proprietary intellectual property rights. It is a high-performance domestic database designed for big data analytics, meeting the growing demands for data query, statistics, analysis, mining, and backup in data-intensive industries. It can serve as the underlying database for data warehouses, BI systems, and decision support systems. With high performance, high availability, and high scalability, GBase 8a provides a cost-effective general-purpose computing platform for data management of any scale and has been widely adopted in urban rail transit, telecommunications, finance, electric power, and other sectors with massive business data, as well as by government departments, Party committees, security-sensitive agencies, national defense, statistics, audit authorities, banking and securities regulators.

As the GBase database family gains momentum in the urban rail transit industry, its footprint is gradually extending to transportation and railway sectors. Going forward, by building on its technical maturity and leadership and deepening commercial adoption, GBase will lay the groundwork for large-scale domestic database deployment.