Behind the Migration: How a Commercial Bank Switched Its Core Banking System to a Chinese Domestic Database

On January 4, 2019, a commercial bank officially upgraded its core banking system database to the GBase transactional database, establishing a pioneering demonstration project for Chinese banks deploying domestic databases in core banking systems.

Background

After the PRISM incident, information security was elevated to an unprecedented level. As a critical national institution, China's banking industry drew top-level attention to its information security risks. Regulators outlined the direction for secure and controllable technologies in banking IT systems, triggering a wave of domestic substitution for both software and hardware.

Previously, the commercial bank’s core banking system ran on a foreign database that had been in operation for 8 years. It stored critical data including customer information, deposits, loans, payments, funds, general ledger, and channel data, covering internal accounting, payment settlement, and central bank regulatory operations. Due to business and data growth coupled with a lack of reliable vendor technical support, numerous problems accumulated that could not be resolved effectively:

● The database periodically failed to back up, requiring a restart to resolve the issue;

● Tables became too large to allow new data insertion;

● Data was stored in a single space, causing poor performance as data grew;

● Table lock granularity, indexes, and configuration parameters were suboptimal;

● Applications and the database co-located on the same server, overloading the server as business grew;

● Lack of effective technical support, making it difficult to resolve issues.

GBase's Solution

After nearly three months of evaluation and testing, the bank planned to upgrade to the GBase transactional database during a data center relocation, with GBase engineers providing full on-site support throughout the process.

During the evaluation and testing, the commercial bank and GBase verified the compatibility between GBase transactional database and the core banking system from multiple dimensions—functionality, performance, reliability, and compatibility—concluding that GBase transactional database was fully capable of replacing the foreign database for the new core system.

Through joint efforts, the new core banking system would adopt GBase transactional database, featuring the following characteristics:

(i) Lean core architecture effectively supporting SOA, enabling rapid support for bank-wide business expansion;

(ii) Data standardization to meet customer analytics, performance assessment, and regulatory requirements;

(iii) Supports 7×24×365 non-stop operations;

(iv) Customer-centric product portfolio;

(v) Supporting framework for interest rate liberalization;

(vi) Supports multi-currency settlement in both local and foreign currencies, flexible cash drawer management, and separation of accounts and accounting subjects;

(vii) Supports remote branches and multi-legal-entity (accounting and management) architecture, as well as intra-institutional and cross-institutional mergers and splits;

(viii) Parameterized system design, interest rate and fee structure design and product-oriented implementation, supporting Fund Transfer Pricing (FTP) internal costing and performance evaluation;

(ix) Efficient end-of-day processing (approx. 20 minutes), supporting horizontal cluster scaling.

On January 4, 2019, the core banking system database was upgraded to GBase transactional database, and both the core banking system and the database have been running smoothly ever since.

The upgrade process was simple and efficient, with only two hours of downtime!

The overall migration process was as follows:

Pre-Migration Preparation:

Database Replacement:

Application Migration:

The entire process involved only 2 hours of core system downtime. After application migration, all functions performed normally, with significant performance improvement!

Upgrade Outcomes

● Fixed database bugs: Backups now run normally without periodic database restarts; backup time reduced from over 2 hours to under 20 minutes.

● Restored table usability: Table data is stored in larger page spaces and sharded across different storage spaces, resolving large table insertion failures.

● Data separation storage: Large table data sharded across different storage spaces, improving performance and backup efficiency.

● Configuration optimization: Optimized table lock granularity, indexes, and configuration parameters to improve concurrency performance.

● Application and database separation: Application and database separated onto different servers to accommodate anticipated business growth pressures.

● Strong service support: GBase provided comprehensive on-site technical support throughout the migration and continues to offer post-migration vendor maintenance services.