Stop Redundant Data Copies! GBase 8a GCDW Delivers Fast, Secure Multi-Tenant Data Sharing

Does cross-tenant data sharing always mean copying and moving data? GBase 8a Cloud Data Warehouse (GCDW) replaces replica synchronization with zero-copy sharing. Its dual-mode design—real-time and snapshot—serves both business analytics and audit compliance. Already deployed at leading state-owned banks and other benchmark customers, GCDW lets you produce data once and reuse it securely across the enterprise.

If you've ever built enterprise data platforms, run data infrastructure, or developed data products, you've hit the same wall: sharing data across departments or tenants means repeatedly copying, syncing, and moving it.

Whether you're distributing unified group dimensions, powering a data platform, pulling data for AI model training, or running reporting across subsidiaries, traditional approaches all rely on ETL pipelines, offline exports, and landed data copies. On the surface, the business runs. Underneath, hidden problems pile up: growing data replicas, spiraling storage costs, inconsistent definitions across departments, frequent sync failures and delays—and, most critically, every data movement multiplies the risk of leakage and non-compliance.

With petabyte-scale data volumes, multi-tenant cloud-native architectures, and stringent compliance mandates, the old "data moving truck" model can no longer keep up. That's why General Data Technology built GCDW—a cloud-native data warehouse on the GBase 8a MPP kernel—reengineering how enterprises share data across tenants.

Addressing the Pain Points: Five Core Advantages of GCDW

The fundamental difference between GCDW and traditional data tools: we don't move data—we grant access. Data stays put in the source tenant's storage, with zero copies, zero migration, and zero new replicas. The target tenant establishes access through a metadata mapping and reads data in place at query time. This eliminates the root causes of the old model.

Zero-Copy Sharing That Slashes Storage Costs at Scale

Once a share is created, the target tenant doesn't need to ingest anything—it just creates a mapping table. That table stores the share relationship and metadata; the actual data stays with the source tenant. This is especially powerful for TB- and PB-scale workloads: it eliminates data redundancy and dramatically cuts both hardware storage costs and the operational overhead of keeping replicas consistent.

Dual-Mode Sharing for Both Real-Time Operations and Compliance Audits

GCDW addresses two core enterprise data needs with two sharing modes:

• Real-time sharing is built for operational monitoring, live dashboards, and ad-hoc queries. The target tenant always sees the source tenant's latest data on every query—no sync jobs required.

• Snapshot sharing locks in a point-in-time, consistent data version. Once a snapshot is taken, subsequent changes to the source data don't affect it. This is purpose-built for financial close, regulatory reporting, and audit trails—keeping analyses consistent, reports stable, and audit data fully traceable.

Table and View Sharing for Standardized Data Governance

GCDW shares not only raw tables but also packaged business views. Source tenants can share curated views with target tenants, hiding the underlying complex data models behind a unified data interface. This shields sensitive data, abstracts away underlying complexity, and gives the enterprise a single, governed data service endpoint—raising the bar on data governance.

Encrypted Metadata Governance for Strong Tenant Isolation

Built on GBase 8a's mature shared metadata layer, all share grants, mappings, and snapshot versions are encrypted and inaccessible to other tenants. The system centralizes share definitions, shared objects, authorized tenants, snapshot versions, and mappings in the common metadata catalog. Only metadata and access permissions are shared—no business data ever moves. Tenant isolation is enforced, every access is auditable and traceable, and the model meets the strictest security and compliance standards demanded by government and enterprises.

Standard SQL Compatibility with Zero Learning Curve

Once the tenant mapping is in place, shared data behaves exactly like local data. Developers don't need to know which tenant the data comes from or how it's accessed underneath—standard SQL is all it takes to query, analyze, and build across tenants. Time to production is minimal.

Production Deployment and Real-World Scenarios

GCDW's zero-copy sharing has been validated at scale in large financial institutions.

A major Chinese state-owned bank built an enterprise-wide data platform on GBase 8a Cloud Data Warehouse, unifying data from headquarters, branches, and business lines with isolated access. Previously, the bank relied on batch ETL: the more branches, the more replicas—driving up storage pressure, causing recurring reporting discrepancies, and creating compliance risks from constant data movement.

After adopting GCDW cross-tenant sharing, headquarters dimension data and risk-control metrics no longer need to be distributed or copied. Branches read them in place through permission mappings. The two parties established a joint innovation lab to apply the cloud data warehouse to core system upgrades. It now supports mission-critical systems including a risk data mart, regulatory reporting, a finance and accounting platform, and branch data marts—scaled to nearly 1,000 nodes. Resource provisioning time dropped from weeks or days to hours. Snapshot sharing locks data versions for reporting and audit cycles, meeting regulatory and internal audit traceability requirements and satisfying the financial industry's stringent compliance demands. This deployment was featured in the 2025 China Cloud Ecosystem Typical Application Cases collection.

Wherever multi-tenant or cross-department data collaboration is needed, GCDW fits: unified group-wide data sharing, external data platform services, secure data access for AI algorithms, financial and government compliance audits, and cost optimization at petabyte scale. Today, GBase databases serve tens of thousands of customers across more than 100 industries—including finance, telecommunications, government, energy, transportation, and defense—with over 100,000 deployed nodes managing more than 500 PB of data.

The core of enterprise digitalization has shifted from "storing massive data" to "moving data securely and efficiently." With zero-copy sharing, dual modes, strong security, and easy deployment, GCDW lets you produce data once and reuse it safely everywhere—breaking through the cost and security bottlenecks of traditional data sharing.