[Employee Spotlight] My Decade of Growth at GBase — Tian Zhimin

Tian Zhimin, Secretary of the General Party Branch at General Data Technology, is from Yanling County, Henan Province. He developed a strong interest in databases during college and has been with GBase for 10 years. He has worked in R&D, technical support, and testing, and has led the development of drivers and tools for GBase 8s, 8a, and 8a MPP, as well as POC testing and system analysis for GBase 8a MPP. He currently spearheads the development of drivers, tools, and middleware for GBase 8s.

Tian is outgoing, sincere, optimistic, and hardworking, with strong organizational, adaptive, and management coordination skills, along with excellent analytical thinking. He reflects on his 10-year journey:

May 24, 2020, marked my 10th anniversary at GBase. Looking back over the decade, I rotated through R&D, technical support, testing, GBase 8d, and GBase 8a MPP, ultimately returning to the R&D team and back to GBase 8s.

Opportunity Favors the Prepared

Shortly after joining the company, I was tasked with upgrading the driver for a major version release of GBase 8s, one of our core products. During the process, I encountered some legacy issues related to compiling with jre1.5 and 1.6, but I didn't pay much attention to them at first.

One Friday before leaving work, I casually ran a sample with jre1.5 and it threw an error. By the end of the day, I still had no clue, so I went back to the office after dinner. Since I wasn't very familiar with the JDBC specification then, nor the interface definition differences between 3.x and 4.0, it wasn't until 1 a.m. that I found the root cause and completely solved it by rewriting the ant script.

On Monday morning, Mr. Zhao told me in the hallway that a project on-site was reporting errors with the JDBC driver and needed an urgent fix. He asked me to check the email and handle it quickly. When I saw the email, I realized this urgent issue was exactly the same problem I had encountered and fixed that Friday evening. I resolved it immediately.

Later, I noticed that email had been forwarded nearly 10 times within the company and had passed through at least five or six senior colleagues without being resolved. I was very lucky to have crushed that problem overnight on Friday. From then on, all sorts of difficult on-site issues started coming my way. Looking back now, those challenges gave me invaluable experience. I also deeply understood that opportunities are always present, but you must always be prepared to seize them.

Three Transitions, Two Milestones

Over my 10 years at the company, I experienced three major transitions, each mirroring the maturation of our products and driving my personal growth. Among them, the shift from R&D to POC transformed my product awareness, and the mutual journey with the development center and GBase 8a MPP allowed me to synthesize everything I had learned. These represent two significant milestones in my career.

The Ups and Downs of Moving from R&D to POC

■ Breaking Through: 10TB on a Single Node, 100 Billion Rows Per Table

In October 2012, we received the acceptance test task for "Project Alpha." The core indicators were GBase 8a handling 10TB on a single node and a 20-node cluster supporting sub-second query responses on a single table with 100 billion rows.

After two months of communicating with the client, building simulated business scenarios, and performance tuning, the final acceptance result was "Excellent." It was during this test that a single GBase 8a node supported a 10TB data volume for the first time, with query response times exceeding requirements in the simulated scenarios. It was also in this project that our GBase 8a MPP cluster first reached a 20-node scale with a single table of 100 billion rows, achieving sub-second responses for simple queries and linear improvement in complex queries as nodes increased. One complex SQL query that took 33 hours on a single node was completed in just 2 hours on the cluster.

Recalling the joy of receiving that "Excellent" rating feels like it was just yesterday.

■ Officially Transitioning to the POC Testing Role

In early 2013, at a critical juncture for the market promotion of the 8a cluster, the company decided to form a dedicated POC testing group led by Mr. Yang Weiwei to better drive GBase 8a MPP's market adoption. Leadership hoped I would transition to the POC testing role. After a brief internal debate, I resolutely made the move. I became one of the first POC team members, kicking off the POC team's journey. Soon after, Sun Ka, Li Yuntao, Zhao Jingxi, Wei Wei, and others joined, and together we blazed a trail to become an ironclad team.

■ The Tough Battle at Agricultural Bank of China

In early 2013, we began engaging with the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) for POC testing (around the Spring Festival). After the holiday, we started POC testing across Software Development Center 6. Ultimately, thanks to three rounds of rigorous POC testing by Zhao Jingxi and others, we convinced the client with our superior product performance.

Looking back, the toughest situation was when cluster installation and deployment dragged on for a week due to a network storm causing anomalies. After resolving the storm, the entire test continued for several months, benchmarking against ABC's existing SybaseIQ system. One day, an engineer surnamed Xu from ABC sent an email stating that even though it was a domestic Chinese database, it was 16 times faster than SybaseIQ.

From that point on, a door cracked open for GBase 8a MPP at ABC headquarters. Ultimately, we did not disappoint. GBase 8a MPP has undergone two generational upgrades at ABC headquarters, continuously supporting their data warehouse for structured data. Today, ABC headquarters has over 1,500 online nodes managing petabytes of structured data.

■ The Unforgettable POC at China Mobile Headquarters

From 2011 to around 2016, China Mobile's headquarters organized four rounds of data warehouse vendor selection tests for its business analysis system. I was fortunate to experience all of them during my time in the POC group. Although I wasn't fully involved hands-on in the last two projects, I must say I am incredibly proud. GBase products stood strong, and our POC brothers, led by Li Yuntao and Sun Ka, held the line.

In these tests, a total of nine vendors and products competed: Sybase SybaseIQ, EMC GreenPlum, IBM Netezza, IBM DB2, Oracle Exadata, Teradata Appliance Turbo, Microsoft SQL Server PDW, GBase, and HP Vertica. Privately, we called it "GBase vs. the Eight-Power Allied Forces of Databases."

After surviving the first two elimination rounds, GBase 8a MPP smoothly advanced to the third and subsequent fourth rounds. The cluster scale grew from 20 nodes to 64, and finally to 125 nodes plus 20 loading machines, with the data scale ultimately tested up to 800TB.

With a rock-solid product and a powerful, indefatigable frontline team, we overcame numerous obstacles through four rounds of testing. Ultimately, we defeated all competitors and won the bid for the China Mobile headquarters centralized business analysis data warehouse. This also opened the door for GBase 8a MPP across China Mobile.

To date, China Mobile headquarters has deployed over 1,000 nodes of GBase 8a MPP clusters, with individual cluster sizes exceeding 200 nodes.

■ A Lingering Pain

To help China achieve a breakthrough for domestic databases in the financial industry, our company leveraged our high-performance, high-stability GBase 8a MPP Cluster, a massively parallel database, to seize the opportunity and secure a place in the shortlisting tests at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).

In March 2013, testing of the GBase 8a MPP Cluster at ICBC commenced. The entire testing project lasted four months, successfully completing two phases covering nine categories of tests. Subsequently, in the second half of 2013, we initiated integration and implementation for the reporting system at ICBC's Shanghai R&D Center and the audit project at its Beijing Data Center.

The following year, 2014, ICBC conducted a second POC test lasting over 20 days at its Shanghai R&D Center, but ultimately selected a competitor. This became a pain that I will never forget.

It was also during this project, due to my inability to adapt to the southern climate and, being young, recklessly overdrawing my health, that I developed a severe lumbar disc herniation. I was struck down by illness, and overnight, I couldn't care for myself. Fortunately, after two hospitalizations and three months of treatment, I returned to work as desired. Looking back now, with the support of leaders at all levels and my colleagues, I remain the same steadfast spirit I once was.

Physical pain can heal quickly, but the pain in my heart remains. I hope that in the future, we will have another opportunity to collaborate with ICBC. That day would finally soothe this lingering ache.

During my two years in POC, our team fought countless tough battles. What I've written here is just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of 2014, due to market promotion needs, the N version of the 8a cluster required a dedicated development center to focus on R&D for the N+1 version. Given my health situation at the time, I applied to return to the development center. By then, the POC team had grown from four seeds into a powerful, battle-hardened force.

One of the greatest gains from my time in technical support was the formation of a product-oriented mindset. Only by engaging directly with frontline customers and facing their demands and "criticism" head-on can you clearly perceive what their core needs are and what kind of product the market requires. Cultivating this product-thinking mindset is not just a subtle shift needed in R&D; it's equally crucial for the support system. This was also a significant milestone in my career.

Growing Together with GBase 8a MPP

For me personally, these two years at the development center were a period of rapid growth, synthesizing the experiences and knowledge from previous years into practical application. Simultaneously, in 2015 and 2016, the GBase 8a cluster grew at a visibly rapid pace. Version 85 quickly and stably captured the domestic MPP database market, while the federated architecture of Version 86 was being productized, building momentum for a later explosion.

During these two years, building on my prior R&D and POC experience, I was also exposed to requirements management and system analysis. By chance, I also led the testing team for two quarters. In this way, I deepened my understanding of product development from various dimensions—pre-sales, POC, requirements, system analysis, R&D, and testing—each offering a different perspective.

While my R&D work at the development center during those two years may have seemed unremarkable, it was actually a period where I integrated and applied everything I had learned and accumulated during my years at the company, making it another important milestone in my career.

The Restructuring of the Tools Department

In 2017, the company established the Tools Department and entrusted it to me, with the goal of building a comprehensive ecosystem of peripheral tools for all the company's flagship databases.

After the department's formation, our first objective was to create a brand-new client tool for GBase 8s, progressing from open-source research and competitive analysis to gathering feedback and system analysis from frontline technical support. After roughly six months, we launched the first prototype of GBase Data Studio. With ongoing investment, we continuously added features like session management, dbspace management, role management, backup and recovery, and more. One day, I saw someone in the GBase 8s technical support group say, "We should use GBase Data Studio more often—it's become quite useful now. The more we use it and provide suggestions, the better it can evolve." A single word of recognition spoke louder than thousands.

That same year, we advanced the development of GBase RTSync, a software for near-real-time incremental data synchronization. We systematically tackled a series of early problems like performance limitations, large transactions, and long transactions. Gradually, GBase RTSync rolled out in projects like the State Grid Liaoning, Tianjin Electric Power, and the D5000 system. Later, with deep optimization between GBase RTSync and the GBase 8a cluster, we penetrated accounts like China Merchants Bank and the China National Intellectual Property Administration. The launch of RTSync filled a gap in data flow between our company's major products, perfected and supplemented the product ecosystem, and initially shaped a closed-loop managed product portfolio, enabling us to compete with a powerful combined punch.

After 2018, due to a corporate strategic adjustment, I was honored to join the DMD team to contribute to the enhancement and improvement of the GBase 8s product.

In this short span of less than two years, my ability to think independently, judge, and make decisions gradually improved. At the same time, I further deepened my understanding that product issues must be considered from the customer's, market's, and industry's perspectives. Only by fully understanding the market, customers, and the industry can we truly achieve the goal of creating products that are not only functional but also user-friendly.

A Rebirth, A New Voyage

In 2019, Mr. Ding took over the company. General Data Technology welcomed a new leadership team led by Ding Mingfeng, rallying the troops with a refined and evolved corporate mission and culture. With a brand-new plan, we faced our problems head-on, ready to fight for survival with everything we had.

In June 2019, the company held a partner conference. This veteran Chinese database vendor, which had been quiet for a while, had undergone a year of upheaval and was now, under Mr. Ding's leadership, taking new strides forward.

"Returning to Battle" at China Mobile Headquarters

As more and more Chinese-developed databases are applied in core production systems in sectors like finance and telecom, these domestic databases have proven capable of replacing traditional centralized commercial databases. On April 28, 2020, at 10:00 a.m., the bidding for China Mobile Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s Autonomous & Controllable OLTP Database Joint Innovation Project opened, and General Data Technology Co., Ltd. won 50% of the bid.

Following the success of the GBase 8a MPP analytical database in penetrating the core telecom sector through the China Mobile business analysis project, I was again fortunate to participate in the pre-bid testing for GBase 8s. Through close collaboration between technical support and R&D, we provided the most powerful technical backing for the frontline marketing team.

A New Office, A New Era, A New Dream

On August 24, 2020, the company moved to a new location, setting sail once again with a brand-new attitude and high morale.

Since the company's founding in 2004, I have personally witnessed countless GBase employees unite, work hard, and forge ahead. Today, our footprint spans the entire nation. The GBase series of databases has over 10,000 nodes online, managing more than 200PB of data, and has been widely adopted in core sectors such as finance, telecom, energy, and government.

Only through experiencing pain can one feel the joy of success. Moving to the new office marks the starting point for the company's next takeoff. As a GBase employee, I am proud!

At this new starting point, the company has a brilliant future ahead. We will spare no effort, meticulously refining our products. We are dedicated to serving our users, leading the industry, and becoming the most trusted database product provider for our customers. We will continue to write a brilliant chapter in the pursuit of enabling the takeoff of China's foundational software industry.

Looking back on a decade of trials and triumphs, the gradual maturation of our products mirrors my own personal growth journey. GBase has left an indelible mark on this ordinary person—that is me. I am grateful for the company providing such an outstanding platform, and I am thankful for the trust and help from leaders and colleagues at all levels along the way.

Go GBase!!!