Author: Lao Yu, this article is reprinted from the official account Lao Yu notes.

On June 1, OceanBase announced the official open source, using mulan public protocol Mulanpub-2.0 version, opening nearly 3 million lines of code, and establishing OceanBase open source community and technical committee. The official website of the community was launched simultaneously.

OceanBase is a financial level distributed relational database developed by Ant Group. It has the characteristics of high availability, extensibility, high compatibility, low cost, strong consistency and high performance. I have experienced ali’s super-scale business scenario, Alipay’s financial level scenario and Double 11 battles.

At present, OceanBase has been applied in many institutions, including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Shandong Mobile, Fujian Mobile, Digital Jiangxi, Sinopec, China Property Insurance, PICC Health insurance, Zheshang Securities, Bank of Tianjin, Bank of Xi ‘an, Changshu Rural Commercial Bank, Dongguan Bank, etc.

Why is OceanBase open source? What’s on? Can open source stay the course this time? These are the questions Lao Yu wants to know. For this reason, Lao Yu specially interviewed Yang Bing, CEO of OceanBase, and Yang Chuanhui, CTO of OceanBase.

Github Star broke 2,000 in one day

As the benchmark of domestic self-developed database, OceanBase open source is obviously attracting much attention. This Open source uses the industry common Open Core model. That is, core open source, peripheral pay. The advantage lies in the clear distinction between open source and non-open source modules, which is difficult to grasp in the degree of trade-off. If the open source part is too weak, developers will feel weak, if the open source part is too large, it will obviously affect the surrounding.

As a matter of fact, OceanBase has won 2100+ stars on Github in just one day of open source, which shows its popularity and also proves developers’ affirmation of OceanBase’s open source sincerity.

Some developers said that OceanBase code is worth a look, high level of appearance, is the “big beauty” in DB. Some developers said that OceanBase was sincere in terms of the amount of code, and learned a lot from just looking at the code in one day.

Some developers said that OceanBase’s ability to develop a software with 3 million lines of code speaks volumes about the strength of the OceanBase team, which is required for large domestic software.

Yang Bing, CEO of OceanBase, said: “OceanBase open source has real material and sincere intention. I’m sure developers will find this out soon.”

OceanBase Community Edition contains a complete database kernel, distributed components, and interface driver layer. The enterprise edition differs from the Community edition only in advanced features such as business feature compatibility, graphical management tools, operational auditing, secure encryption, and high availability extensions. “Yang Chuanhui, CTO of OceanBase, told Lao Yu.

Open source is trying to do the hard and right thing

Back to one year ago, on June 8, 2020, Ant Group announced that it would independently develop its database product OceanBase into a company named Beijing Aoxing Best Technology Co., LTD.

From the day the independent company was founded, the OceanBase management team had been thinking about what to do next. Take what? Give up? Do only offline? Do you want the online one? Cloud is the trend, as an independent database company, neutrality is needed to maintain, how to do multi-cloud adaptation? These are very difficult decisions.

“As THE CEO of the company, the most important thing I think about is the life and death of the company. What does OceanBase do to die?” Yang Bing told the old fish. The time window is important, and OceanBase must seize it. OceanBase doesn’t have to be open source if it’s just to make some money, but OceanBase’s dream is to be the best world-class database.

OceanBase has been “doing the hard and right thing” since its inception, Mr. Yang said. It is difficult to build a database, but it is even more difficult to choose the path of self-research, and it is also difficult to become the world’s no. 1. OceanBase always chooses the most difficult bone to chew, because OceanBase team thinks these things are worth doing and the right thing. Because only in this way can we truly achieve the core substitution of localization.

‘There is no shortage of a database company in China, but there is a shortage of a high-end database that can really do the core substitution,’ Mr. Yang said.

As a matter of fact, the challenge of localization is still very big at present. OceanBase is not bad in domestic databases, but there is still a gap to achieve full localization only by relying on today’s capabilities. As an important participant in domestic databases, OceanBase hopes to develop faster. However, open source can help OceanBase to apply more quickly and promote the product to mature and land faster. Therefore, OceanBase chose open source, and there was no confusion in the senior management of the team and the group. Yang chuanhui said.

Open source will continue to do so

In fact, earlier versions of OceanBase were open source, only to be closed later. So, how is open source different this time, and will history repeat itself?

Obviously, this is a sharp question. But the old fish asked. This is definitely something that a lot of developers care about.

Yang chuan-hui said that OceanBase did open source in early version 0.4, but at that time, open source was technical, that is, purely technical sharing and contribution, and there was also an element of copyfollowing. At that time, Alibaba opened many projects and OceanBase, as one of the technologies, opened source. However, at that time, we were not fully prepared in terms of architecture, code maturity and operation planning.

But this OceanBase open source is completely different from earlier open sources. ‘Today, open source has become an important technology strategy for OceanBase,’ Mr. Yang said. Open source is a strategic decision made with technical and business considerations in mind.

“It’s a sign that OceanBase is here to stay, and it has a dedicated team to operate and maintain it, and it’s a big team.” Yang Bing said. Although OceanBase doesn’t have a lot of open source operating experience, it still has a lot to learn. However, Yang Bing believes that there is no such thing as an obstacle that cannot be overcome, and the team is good at solving problems. After all, even the Alipay scene and TPC-C have passed. Therefore, as long as we set a good direction, we should do it, but we need to learn the way of doing things.

It is worth emphasizing that OceanBase is a self-developed database, which is different from self-developed databases based on open source MySQL or PostgreSQL secondary development. There is no existing ecosystem, so it is necessary to completely build a third ecosystem parallel to MySQL. As a result, OceanBase will have a tougher time getting started, Mr. Yang said. This is because all the code is third-party, not MySQL and PostgreSQL. So there are steep upfront costs.

In order to reduce the steep cost, OceanBase also came up with the “Spring Breeze Ten Miles” plan, set up 10 benchmark customers, actively preach doorto door, and actively provide VIP services, without asking for customers’ return, just to help customers to succeed and make OceanBase really use. Yang chuanhui said. To that end, he has set himself a small goal of going live every two months, not to talk about ideas, but to share technology and code.

In general, OceanBase is serious about open source rather than making a show of it. Its open source purpose and roadmap are clear. More importantly, OceanBase has the intention of long-term continuous investment and enough patience for open source.

It remains to be seen whether open source will help OceanBase achieve its dream of a world-class database.