Data Empowers Free Trade Port | GBase Database Enables a Bank in Hainan to Build a High-Performance, Standardized Data Platform

In recent years, as interest rate liberalization accelerates and internet finance develops rapidly, traditional banks have been impacted by emerging internet finance, giving rise to new products, services, and business models. At the same time, big data technology has become more mature, offering higher cost-effectiveness, stronger computing and storage capabilities, and easier scalability, enabling the full value of data to be leveraged—an essential foundation for banks adapting to the internet finance and big data era. Against the backdrop of the accelerated development of the Hainan Free Trade Port, a bank in Hainan is building a standardized and integrated data platform to speed up digital transformation, promote financial product and business innovation, and provide high-quality financial services to support the port’s high-quality growth.

Currently, this bank is in an entirely new phase of business development, with diverse business models and rapidly growing data volumes. The increasing richness of business data in both content and format raises higher requirements for overall data support and service capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to build a big data platform based on big data technology that integrates existing internal data, incorporates external data, and features strong parallel processing capabilities and easy scalability.

The bank has adopted a hybrid architecture combining an MPP database cluster with a Hadoop cluster to build a low-cost, high-performance, large-capacity, and highly scalable data foundation platform. Specifically, the MPP database cluster uses GBase 8a MPP Cluster as the computing engine layer, delivering powerful computing and analytics capabilities to the entire data platform.

Introducing GBase Database to Build a Standardized, High-Performance Data Platform

By introducing GBase 8a MPP Cluster—a distributed logical data warehouse—alongside a Hadoop cluster, the bank built a low-cost, high-performance, large-capacity, and easily scalable data foundation platform. This enables centralized collection, storage, processing, analysis, and application of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Based on this technical architecture, the bank has reconstructed its data warehouse and standardized historical data storage, forming a standardized, high-performance foundational data system that supports enterprise-wide management and business applications.

Data Platform Technical Architecture Diagram

The unified data platform aggregates the bank’s primary business data. In terms of process, the platform first completes the processing and standardization of common data. On this basis, a flexible, autonomous, open, easy-to-use, and secure self-service data portal is further developed, integrating data analysis and visualization tools to help business units efficiently meet query and analysis needs. It also accelerates development efficiency and response times, rapidly supporting upstream applications’ data requirements.

As the computing engine layer of the data middle platform, GBase database handles various subject-oriented model processing and batch jobs, and provides external data access. During the project implementation, it demonstrated leading performance and architectural advantages:

Scalability

Featuring a fully parallel MPP + Shared Nothing federation architecture, it provides horizontal scalability for both capacity and performance;

Data Fusion

Exceptional fusion capabilities enable transparent data interaction with the Hadoop data lake, building a lake-house integrated solution covering the full data lifecycle;

High Performance, Maintenance-Free

Utilizing high-performance, maintenance-free intelligent index technology, the index occupies no more than 1% of storage space. Intelligent indexing includes column statistics, effectively filtering data during retrieval and dramatically reducing disk I/O, thereby significantly improving query performance on massive data volumes;

Efficient Data Management

Flexible configuration of resource pools and usage plans enables vertical resource isolation for different database users, supporting control over critical resources and metrics such as CPU, memory, disk space, disk I/O, and concurrent tasks. It also provides comprehensive multi-tenancy capabilities.

Application Results

The data platform deployed over ten GBase database nodes, managing petabytes of the bank’s business data. It supports applications across external regulatory reporting, asset-liability management, business management, and risk management. Across multiple business domains and scenarios, it delivers deep big data analytics and comprehensive applications, providing a high-performance data engine for business operations and growth.

Support Business Objectives: Achieve unified management of data resources, comprehensively enhance data service capabilities, fully unlock data value, meet the needs of customer marketing, risk control, operations management, and external regulation, drive data governance, and improve data resource management and comprehensive data asset application capabilities;

Low Cost and Self-Reliant Control: Built on an entirely domestic software and hardware stack, it significantly reduces construction costs while ensuring infrastructure security and reliability, mitigating potential external risks in operation, maintenance, and upgrades, and safeguarding financial data security;

Business Continuity: Leveraging a Shared-Nothing architecture, it supports online scaling on demand without service interruption, effectively ensuring business continuity and providing a robust foundation for business innovation;

Hybrid Architecture for Full Data Integration: GBase database enables transparent data interaction across heterogeneous platforms, jointly building a lake-house architecture for the full data lifecycle alongside the Hadoop cluster.

Conclusion

The successful implementation of the standardized, high-performance data platform based on GBase database at a bank in Hainan represents a perfect synergy between technology and finance. Looking ahead, GBase will provide more in-depth and professional data products and technical services. While helping customers improve the quality and efficiency of financial services, we will inject the innovative vitality of Chinese technology into the high-quality economic development of the Hainan Free Trade Port, enabling its high-level opening to accelerate with data-driven momentum.