2022 Sand Dune Conference · IT Application Innovation Session – GBASE on Selecting the Right Database for the Financial Industry

On December 10, the 2022 Sand Dune Conference · IT Application Innovation Session was held as scheduled. This session was co-hosted by the Sand Dune Community and the Database Application Innovation Laboratory of CAICT,Feng Wenzhong, Technical Director of GBASE, was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech on “Application of China-developed Databases in the Financial Industry”. 

As a critical component of financial information systems, databases are the core infrastructure software supporting the digital transformation of the financial industry. As one of China’s first database vendors, GBASE has witnessed the entire journey of China’s database industry from unusable to practical and from development to maturity. The financial industry has long been a strategic focus for GBASE. GBASE databases have served over 200 financial users, covering multiple business scenarios from desktop office to core application systems. They effectively meet the high-performance and high-availability requirements of financial services, providing a solid data foundation for fintech construction. 

In this sharing session, Feng Wenzhong systematically introduced the positioning and deployment models of database management systems, the evolution of modern databases, and the global distribution of database enterprises, offering a comprehensive view of the database industry’s landscape and development.

Regarding the application of databases in China’s financial industry, Feng Wenzhong pointed out that China-developed databases are widely used in office, general, and core systems. Among sub-sectors such as banking, insurance, and securities, the banking industry has the deepest adoption. By deployment type, centralized deployment accounts for nearly 90%, while distributed and cloud databases are also in use.

Meanwhile, he offered several suggestions on database product selection:

Database Selection Criteria

• Analyze “business requirements”: business type, current business situation, and 5-10 year development plans;
• Formulate the “system architecture” based on the overall IT architecture plan, including: centralized, distributed, traditional deployment models, cloud deployment models, etc.;
• Select the database type according to the “system architecture”;
• Choose the database based on “business requirements”.

Fundamental Requirements for Database Selection

Thoughts on System Construction

1. Database Selection

Select based on business scenarios, avoid selecting for individual projects, and reduce “selection costs” and “trial-and-error costs”;

Use multiple products to avoid dependence on a single product.

2. Loose Coupling Between Applications and Databases

Traditional system construction focuses on functionality, resulting in many systems that implement business logic through stored procedures and triggers;

In new system designs, applications and databases should each play their own roles, reducing the dumping of logic into the database, easing database pressure, and simplifying migration and maintenance;

3. Overemphasizing Compatibility During Product Selection Is a Myth

Avoid the compatibility trap in product selection; the core is to find a database that works well in practice;

Each database has its own architectural strengths and performance characteristics. Overemphasizing compatibility stifles database evolution.

About GBASE

GBASE (General Data Technology Co., Ltd.) was founded in 2004. Since its inception, the company has adhered to independent innovation, with full control over its core technologies and underlying source code. It is one of China’s few independent database service providers that focuses on database product R&D and has achieved large-scale deployment in the financial and telecom industries. GBASE has built a data product portfolio and service solutions covering the entire data management lifecycle and full technology stack.

Its self-developed database products, including the distributed logical data warehouse GBase 8a, the shared-storage database cluster GBase 8s, and the multi-model distributed database GBase 8c, have been applied in key sectors such as finance, telecom, government, energy, transportation, and national defense. The user base spans all 32 provincial-level administrative regions in China, with over 30,000 deployed nodes and more than 300 PB of data under management.