Versatile and highly innovative, the GBase 8c database wins the Gold Award at the Kunpeng Application Innovation Contest.

What makes the multi-model, multi-form distributed database GBase 8c, which won the gold award in the openGauss track, truly valuable? What technical innovations are built on openGauss? What is its business value? In which scenarios is it applied?

The Kunpeng Application Innovation Contest, a premier annual event for global developers, has been held for three years. Over these three years, the contest has encouraged Kunpeng developers to innovate in industry applications based on the full-stack Kunpeng software and hardware technology, solving real industry challenges, accelerating cross-domain technology integration, and fostering industry talent.

Recently, the Kunpeng Application Innovation Contest 2022 National Finals (the "Contest") concluded successfully. Centered on seven tracks—Digital Government, FinTech, Enterprise Digitalization, openEuler, openGauss, HPC (High-Performance Computing), and Startup Applications—the contest saw GBase's multi-model, multi-form distributed database GBase 8c, built on openGauss, win the gold award in the openGauss track.

These are questions that many may have. To address them, Zhang Yi, General Manager of Product at General Data Technology Co., Ltd. (GBase), was invited by ZDNet for an interview, where he shared many details of the award-winning solution. As a senior engineer with years of experience in hardware and software product development and management, Zhang has deep expertise in distributed databases and oversees the entire lifecycle of GBase 8c—from planning and R&D to market promotion.

Open Source: The Fountainhead of Innovation for the "Crown Jewel" of Software

With the rapid growth of Internet and especially mobile Internet services, traditional centralized databases struggle to meet the high-concurrency and high-throughput demands of new applications and scenarios such as promotional campaigns, flash sales, and peak travel seasons. A new type of database is urgently needed, and distributed databases with elastic scalability, which can significantly reduce total cost of ownership, are the best solution to this challenge.

Databases are known as the crown jewel of foundational software and are notoriously difficult to develop. Distributed databases amplify that challenge, requiring developers not only to master database kernel development but also to have deep expertise in networking principles, distributed computing, and more. To accelerate innovation in distributed databases, open source is the best path forward, and openGauss is a prime example. Since its open-source release in June 2020, the openGauss community has become one of China's most innovative open-source database root communities. As an open-source database, openGauss delivers high performance, high security, and high reliability, offering single-node and primary-standby relational database capabilities.

A Distributed Database Full of Value and Innovation

General Data Technology Co., Ltd. (GBase) is one of the few independent database vendors in China focused on database product R&D with large-scale deployments in the financial and telecommunications sectors. GBase officially joined the openGauss community at the end of 2021, yet it was the first to launch a distributed database product based on openGauss 3.0. Building a distributed database on openGauss requires a deep understanding of openGauss's architecture and design, on top of which distributed capabilities are then built. "GBase has nearly two decades of database R&D experience. Our flagship product, GBase 8a, is a distributed analytical database. This experience provided the foundation for developing GBase 8c, a native distributed database built on openGauss," said Zhang Yi.

As the only native distributed database currently built on openGauss 3.0, GBase 8c has undergone extensive optimization at the system architecture and kernel levels compared with middleware-based solutions that offer distributed capabilities. Its core strengths lie in strong data consistency and complex query performance.

GBase 8c provides global strong consistency. By issuing global timestamps through a global transaction manager, it ensures strong consistency for all data within the entire cluster—a key advantage over the eventual consistency of middleware-based solutions, making it more suitable for core business systems.

GBase 8c enables data exchange between data nodes. For complex queries, middleware solutions must pull all data to the middleware layer for filtering and processing, which increases network load and middleware stress with large data volumes. In contrast, GBase 8c can push down complex queries to the data nodes, allowing them to exchange data and perform computations locally. By parallelizing processing across multiple data nodes, overall cluster efficiency is greatly improved.

"With these capabilities, GBase 8c enables users to work with a distributed database as easily as with a centralized one, making the transition between database architectures seamless," Zhang Yi noted.

Strengthening Distributed Capabilities, Delivering One-Stop Solutions

GBase 8c is a multi-model, multi-form native distributed database built on openGauss 3.0, supporting multiple storage modes—row, column, and in-memory—and various deployment forms, including single-node, primary-standby, and distributed.

Zhang Yi elaborated on "multi-model, multi-form": "Multi-model" refers to multiple storage modes. Leveraging the row, column, and in-memory storage engines provided by openGauss, GBase 8c supports multiple storage engines to meet diverse business scenarios. Specifically:

1. Row storage engine: Designed primarily for OLTP scenarios, such as ordering, shipping, and bank transaction systems.

2. Column storage engine: Designed primarily for OLAP scenarios, such as statistical reports and analytics systems.

3. In-memory engine: Designed for extreme performance scenarios, such as bank risk control.

"Multi-form" refers to multiple deployment forms. Building on openGauss's original single-node and primary-standby deployments, GBase 8c adds distributed deployment capabilities, giving the product three deployment modes: single-node, primary-standby, and distributed.

Zhang Yi further explained: "Single-node deployment is the most classic form, offering low cost and simplicity. The primary-standby mode supports one primary with multiple standbys, combining simplicity with efficient delivery and basic disaster recovery capability; it is suitable for scenarios with moderate data volumes that require optimal single-node performance and a certain level of high availability. The distributed mode supports high availability with full component redundancy and enables separation of compute and storage, allowing independent horizontal scaling of computing and storage resources based on business needs. This mode is ideal for large-scale, high-concurrency scenarios that demand high data security."

Co-creating a Leading Database Product, Accelerating Deployment in Core Industry Systems

Throughout GBase 8c's development, the openGauss team provided extensive support. During the conceptual phase, they organized multiple training sessions for developers, explaining the community version's architecture and design. This enabled GBase's R&D staff to quickly grasp the openGauss framework and understand its differentiated advantages over foreign open-source databases.

For example, compared with 32-bit transaction IDs (xid) in some foreign open-source databases, openGauss provides 64-bit xids. Each database transaction consumes an xid, and as transaction volumes grow, xid exhaustion can cause database freezes, disrupting normal operations. "GBase 8c is a distributed database that handles several times or even dozens of times the transaction volume of a centralized database, making xid exhaustion much more likely. By extending xid from 32-bit to 64-bit, openGauss greatly reduces this risk, providing strong support for stable business operations," Zhang explained.

During the design phase, openGauss community technical experts reviewed GBase 8c's architecture to ensure design soundness and competitive strength. During the development phase, the community provided one-on-one guidance on specific coding issues, boosting development efficiency.

Today, GBase 8c—a multi-model, multi-form native distributed database built on openGauss 3.0—delivers high performance, high availability, elastic scalability, and high security. It can be deployed on physical servers, virtual machines, containers, private clouds, and public clouds, providing secure, stable, and reliable data storage and management services for core systems in critical industries, Internet businesses, and government and enterprise systems.

GBase 8c has already been deployed in several projects, including health QR code systems, online lending platforms at city commercial banks, identity authentication platforms, and market regulation commissions. For a government department in southern China, a new database built with GBase 8c resolved the challenges of high-concurrency health code display and scanning during peak hours, solving performance bottlenecks at low cost. In finance and telecommunications, GBase 8c has also completed proof-of-concept tests and will progressively replace traditional centralized databases to support core business systems. 

Zhang Yi expressed strong confidence in the partnership. Looking ahead, GBase will continue to invest R&D resources to co-build the open-source database root community, making openGauss a mainstream open-source community in the database industry. On the market front, GBase will collaborate with openGauss to deliver more industry solutions, bringing native distributed database capabilities to drive digital innovation and development across industries and enterprises, and contributing to the advancement of the database industry.

It is clear that openGauss represents Huawei's contribution of decades of database expertise to promote an open-source ecosystem. Building on openGauss and drawing on its own two decades of database experience, GBase developed GBase 8c—a multi-model, multi-form native distributed database—enriching the openGauss distributed database ecosystem.