DTCC Interview | GBASE’s Engineering Exploration of Third-Generation Intelligent Distributed Database Technology Innovation

At the 15th China Database Technology Conference (DTCC2024), GBASE shared how its third-generation intelligent database GBase 8c empowers enterprises to handle diverse scenarios and drive business growth through innovative practices.
After the conference, Zhang Yi, General Manager of the GBase 8c Product Business Unit, was interviewed by ITPUB for an in-depth discussion on hot topics in the distributed database field.

1. Could you introduce the changes in GBase 8c over the past year? What progress has been made?

GBase 8c is a multi-model, multi-mode distributed database product launched by GBASE. Over the past year, GBase 8c has made encouraging progress in both product capabilities and application depth.

In terms of product capabilities, GBase 8c introduced vector storage last year, a crucial capability in the DB4AI domain during the era of large models. With vector storage, GBase 8c can support data processing more efficiently, especially data access for large models, which is relatively rare among Chinese databases.

Meanwhile, in application depth, we have deployed GBase 8c in numerous core business systems in sectors such as finance and telecommunications. For example, in a bank's core credit system, GBase 8c successfully replaced the legacy database and significantly improved system processing performance. In the O-domain and B-domain core business areas of telecom operators, GBase 8c helped users migrate systems to an all-in-one appliance and, through its multi-tenant capabilities, significantly reduced overall O&M complexity and costs.

2. You mentioned that in the distributed database field, the competition lies in achieving engineering and productization to support applications quickly and efficiently. Could you elaborate on your engineering practices?

There is a consensus in both database academia and the industry that the theoretical framework of databases is relatively mature. Undeniably, some subtle innovations and unique product optimizations are important factors that differentiate similar products, but for database vendors, standardized productization and engineering to support applications are the keys to profitability and continuous iteration.

GBASE has always positioned itself asan independent database vendor focused on database products and services, with large-scale deployments in critical sectors such as finance and telecommunications. Over the past two decades, we have consistently adhered to this positioning, concentrating purely on database product R&D. Through two decades of accumulation, we have truly achieved standardized productization and engineering of databases, allowing customers to use them with confidence and trust in our product quality and service standards.

We strictly follow the IPD (Integrated Product Development) model, and have established a quality management department in our organizational structure that is independent of the product and sales systems, ensuring that every stage of product R&D meets customer demands and expectations. This systematic R&D process enables us to respond rapidly to market changes and deliver high-quality products and services.

3. What are your observations on the current attitudes and adoption of distributed databases across industries? What strategies do you adopt?

When discussing distributed databases, centralized databases must be mentioned. The relationship between the two has always been a focal point of debate in both academic and industrial circles.We believe distributed and centralized architectures are not antagonistic or mutually exclusive. It is simply that some scenarios are more suitable for distributed databases, while others offer better cost-effectiveness with centralized databases. It is not a case of using one for core systems and the other for edge systems. The key is to look at requirements—concurrency, data volume, and whether high-availability capabilities can meet business needs.
   
For some core business systems with high concurrency and large data volumes, distributed databases may be more appropriate, as they can scale out horizontally to enhance processing power while supporting better elastic scaling and load balancing. For general business systems that may not require such high levels of high availability or handle large data volumes, a distributed database like GBase 8c can be chosen, relying on its multi-tenant capabilities to reduce management and O&M costs.

4. How do you ensure a smoother and more stable transition or upgrade to a distributed database?

Migration between database products is never completely smooth. Even products under the same architecture have differences, let alone migrating from a centralized to a distributed system. What GBase 8c is doing is making this differentiation process during migration more intelligent.
 
GBASE has adopted patented intelligent data distribution algorithm technology. In past engineering practices, the users' business experts and our database team would jointly design a data distribution plan, followed by verification, debugging, and testing—a cycle that was long and costly.
 
Now, based on our self-developed intelligent data distribution technology, algorithms automatically optimize data distribution. After completing a rough data classification, tests are run based on real business scenarios, and the system undergoes continuous recursive optimization through cost evaluation. Through engineering practice, the overall time has been reduced to 20%–50% of the original, significantly lowering the costs of manual intervention and debugging.
 

5. What are the future plans for GBase 8c?

Our ultimate goal is to evolve GBase 8c into a Data Cloud. In the past, databases in the cloud were defined as PaaS infrastructure components. However, after migrating to the cloud, it is difficult to control the disaster recovery tier of databases in terms of both construction costs and data security. In the future, we want to achieve physical isolation between data and the cloud at the application level. Data is data, managed from the physical resource layer, and through our multi-tenant and high-security capabilities, we aim to achieve high-level high availability while meeting the demands for virtualization and cloudification.