GBase 8s New Storage Engine Released: Unleashing Extreme Performance for Production

Published on 2025-05-21

Recently, the new GBase 8s storage engine was officially released. Targeting production scenarios, the new engine delivers high-performance multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), boosted high-concurrency capabilities, dramatically shortened failover time, more comprehensive online DDL, and instant flashback queries. Built for modern hardware with multi-core CPUs, high-performance I/O, and large memory, the engine rearchitects its transaction processing and system foundation to consistently deliver efficient and stable database services to enterprise users.

 

1. Core Highlights of the New Engine

01 In-Memory MVCC: Eliminate Disk Bottlenecks and I/O Jitter for a Performance Boost

Traditional Pain Points:

  • Traditional MVCC relies on disk (e.g., undo log or in-place updates), easily causing I/O bottlenecks, disk bloat, and VACUUM performance jitter.

Innovative Solution:

  • In-memory historical versions (HUB engine) separate read and write operations, enhancing multi-version query performance;

  • Dynamic garbage collection (GC) automatically reclaims invalid versions, preventing resource leaks caused by long transactions;

  • Version access at COMMITTED READ and REPEATABLE READ isolation levels is supported.

 

02 Ultra-Fast Failover: Unfazed by Production Loads, Stable and Rapid Switchover

  • Under stress testing, failover time is consistently within 3+ seconds (on mechanical shared storage), and can be further reduced with SSD storage;

  • Fully meets the high-availability requirements of financial-grade production environments.

 

03 Consistent Reads (for Read/Write Separation Scenarios)

Traditional Pain Points:

  • In conventional read/write separation architectures, replica nodes replay transactions out of order, which may cause reads on the replica to not reflect the transactional consistency of the primary node.

New Engine Optimizations:

  • Global timestamp synchronization: The primary and replica coordinate data visibility using a unified commit timestamp, ensuring that query results on replicas strictly match the transactional consistency state of the primary.

 

04 High Concurrency, Low Jitter: Handles Peak Production Workloads

  • Through lock-free design and AUTO TUNE technology, concurrency performance is boosted and jitter minimized, delivering stable performance at 3,000 concurrent connections and higher;

  • A built-in rate limiting mechanism prevents avalanches under extreme concurrency, ensuring service continuity.

 

05 Instant Flashback Query: Handle Human Errors in Seconds

  • Based on an in-memory snapshot mechanism, historical data can be queried without log rollbacks.

 

06 Online DDL: Zero Business Disruption

  • Supports online execution of 20+ high-frequency DDL scenarios, including ALTER TABLE, CREATE/DROP INDEX, and partition table maintenance.

 

07 TEXT/BYTE Performance Boost & Insensitivity to Long Transactions

  • TEXT/BYTE performance is exponentially improved. For example, for a 100 KB large object, delete time is reduced to 1/200th of the original and update time to 1/2.5; the larger the object, the greater the performance gain;

  • Intermediate version GC technology alleviates the resource footprint of long transactions, preventing system blocking.

 

2. Customer Value

GBase 8s is committed to building efficient and stable data services centered on production environments.

Appendix: Supported Online DDL Scenarios

1. ALTER TABLE (table structure changes) 

2. Index Management 

3. Partition Table Maintenance