Features

Distributed transaction engine

The distributed transaction engine of OceanBase Database strictly supports the ACID properties of transactions and ensures strong data consistency across the entire cluster. It is the only native distributed relational database in the world to pass the standard TPC-C test.

OceanBase Database uses the Paxos protocol to replicate transaction logs to multiple data replicas. This ensures transaction availability and durability.

Transparent scalability

OceanBase Database provides excellent scalability using its unique RootService and partition-level load balancing. The system supports seamless online scale-out and scale-in, and automatically balances the system load after scaling. This process is transparent to applications and ensures continuous service.

OceanBase Database also supports dynamic scaling for massive clusters with over 1,500 nodes, more than 3 PB of data in a single cluster, and trillions of rows in a single table. In TPC-C scenarios, the system's scaling ratio can reach 1:0.9. This helps you maximize your hardware investment.

High availability

OceanBase Database uses a multi-replica, shared-nothing architecture. This design eliminates single points of failure and ensures continuous system availability. It supports high availability and disaster recovery at the server, data center, and city levels. You can deploy it in a single data center, two data centers, a three-data-center-across-two-regions architecture, or a five-data-center-across-three-regions architecture. In tests, it achieves a recovery point objective (RPO) of 0 and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 8 seconds for city-level failures. This meets Level 6, the highest international standard for disaster recovery.

OceanBase Database also provides a primary/secondary database feature based on log replication. This provides more flexible options for high availability and disaster recovery. The primary cluster synchronizes data by sending transaction logs to a secondary cluster. This allows the production cluster to quickly recover services in case of data corruption or a disaster. If the production cluster becomes unavailable for any reason, planned or unplanned, you can promote a secondary cluster to the primary role. This ensures continuous service and minimizes downtime.

OceanBase Database also provides physical backup and recovery based on block and transaction log copies. This feature is a core component of the system's high availability.

Hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP)

The unique distributed computing engine of OceanBase Database allows multiple compute nodes to run both online transactional processing (OLTP) and complex online analytical processing (OLAP) applications simultaneously. This design maximizes database utilization and leverages the power of multiple nodes to support both OLTP and OLAP workloads.

OceanBase Database uses a single computing engine to support mixed workloads. This lets you solve 80% of your data processing problems with a single system. This is a major advantage over many other distributed databases that require two different computing engines or even two separate database systems to support OLTP and OLAP workloads.

Multi-tenancy

OceanBase Database uses a single-cluster, multi-tenant design. It natively supports a cloud database architecture and can be deployed on public, private, or hybrid clouds.

OceanBase Database uses tenants for resource isolation. Each database service instance is isolated from other instances. Access control ensures data security among different tenants. Combined with its powerful scalability, OceanBase Database provides a secure and flexible Database as a Service (DBaaS).

High compatibility

OceanBase Database is highly compatible with the two most widely used database ecosystems: Oracle and MySQL.

OceanBase Database supports the full syntax of MySQL 5.6. This allows for the seamless migration of applications from MySQL.

OceanBase Database supports most Oracle syntax and nearly all of its procedural language features. Most applications that run on Oracle can be migrated automatically with only minor changes. Many financial industry customers and internal teams at Alibaba have successfully migrated their applications to OceanBase Database.

Full intellectual property rights

OceanBase Database was developed independently by Ant Group. It is not based on open-source databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. This ensures the technology is reliable and free from the technical limitations of open-source products.

High performance

OceanBase Database functions as an in-memory database, typically processing data directly in memory. It uses a storage engine based on a Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) structure. This hardware-friendly design delivers read and write performance that far exceeds traditional relational databases.

Security

OceanBase Database implements the key security features that enterprises require. It supports a comprehensive system of permissions and roles. It also supports features such as SSL, transparent data encryption, auditing, Label Security, and IP address whitelists. The design is based on extensive research into enterprise security needs and various security standards. OceanBase Database has passed the Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS) 2.0 Level 3 certification.