To do engineering, we need to go to the market and to the demand to truly realize the value. In terms of scientific and technological innovation, enterprises can play the role of question writers, answerers, and markers.
Faced with the CEO's question of confidence, Yang Zhenkun, who was standing by the window, said: "If there is a problem, we are ready to jump from here." ”
Do things to stand up to the sky. Dingtian is to make things that are technically superior, and to stand on the ground is to think about how others will use it when doing it.
Text |"Lookout" Newsweek reporter Li Song.
Yang Zhenkun (second from right) and engineers discuss (data**) Photo by Zhang Penghong.
There are a total of 5 databases that are commonly used in the world.
Four were made in the United States and one was born in Europe, which was later acquired by American companies. This is an area where American technology has long dominated absolutely.
Compared with chips, databases are a little rusty and mysterious to the public. Databases, operating systems and chips are known as the three core foundations of modern information technology. Among them, databases, as a key technology for storing, processing, and analyzing data, are known as the foundation of the digital economy.
In China, the database belongs to the key basic software track that is "stuck in the neck". On this track, since the emergence of several large databases in Europe and the United States in the 90s of the 20th century, due to the high threshold of competition, there is no new database of the same level in the world. China's database market has long been monopolized by foreign manufacturers.
There was a saying in the field of information and innovation: "Digital China" grows on a foreign base. With the outbreak of the Internet bringing massive amounts of data, how to deal with data is related to national information security.
Faced with such a reality, scientist Yang Zhenkun led the team to independently develop the first distributed database with 100% independent intellectual property rights in China - Oceanbase.
Compared with the current centralized database, the distributed database can be regarded as changing lanes and overtaking, and has both the functions of "accounting" (OLTP) and "data analysis" (OLAP) that the centralized database cannot have at the same time.
At present, Oceanbase has not only allowed Alipay, which incubated it, to completely replace the foreign database it originally relied on, but also began to export to the outside world, serving more than 1,000 customers, covering finance, government affairs, energy and many other industries, so that the world has the first Chinese database that can be applied to the core business of finance on a large scale.
To the market, to the demand.
Yang Zhenkun is the vice president of Ant Group and the founder and chief scientist of Oceanbase.
Yang Zhenkun entered Peking University in 1984, received a doctorate degree in computer science, and stayed in the school, following his mentor Academician Wang Xuan, and made contributions to the research and development of laser phototypesetting system.
With his contributions to the field of laser phototypesetting, Yang Zhenkun was exceptionally promoted to professor, and in 1999, he became one of the first batch of Changjiang Scholars Award Program Distinguished Professors of Peking University. At the age of 36, he resigned from Peking University.
The reason is that Yang Zhenkun feels: "After the laser phototypesetting technology matures, I can still do something for the society at my age." The concept of mentor Wang Xuan influenced him, to do engineering, you need to go to the market, to the demand to truly realize the value. In terms of scientific and technological innovation, enterprises can play the role of question writers, answerers, and markers.
Seeing the maturity and development of the Internet industry, Yang Zhenkun decided to jump out of his comfort zone and go to the enterprise to find a new direction that can make him useful to the society.
It took Yang Zhenkun 8 years to find the new direction of database research in the market. In 2010, Yang Zhenkun joined Alibaba. At that time, China's mobile Internet began to explode, bringing massive amounts of data, and traditional centralized databases were overwhelmed and expensive in dealing with massive storage, high concurrency, disaster recovery and operation and maintenance. Someone calculated that for China's e-commerce industry, 1 trillion yuan of gross merchandise transaction volume (GMV) means that 20 billion yuan of procurement fees will be paid to IOE (IBM, Oracle, EMC) every year.
This made Yang Zhenkun see an opportunity. If the processing power and capacity of the database are compared to a "horse-drawn cart", as the data grows, the solution of the traditional centralized database is to make the "horse" bigger, and the centralized database born decades ago can hardly cope with this exponential growth and high cost. And there is a disadvantage, if one machine fails, the whole system will collapse. Yang Zhenkun, who has studied distributed systems, realized that using distributed to lay out the database and using many "ponies" to pull the "big cart" together is not only more flexible, high reliability, but also lower cost.
Non-utilitarianism can go further.
The data shows that behind every national science and technology award, scientists have to sit on the "cold bench" for an average of 16 years.
Yang Zhenkun led a team of dozens of people to start the road of distributed database.
It wasn't until 2014 that during the test on the eve of "Double 11", due to a technical failure, the technical team urgently activated Oceanbase, and Yang Zhenkun and others came to the opportunity to prove themselves.
In the "Double 11" of that year, in the face of the CEO's inquiry, Yang Zhenkun, who was standing by the window, said: "If there is a problem, we are ready to jump from here." ”
In the end, everything went well. Since then, Oceanbase has withstood Alipay's "Double 11" transaction peaks again and again at a cost far lower than that of traditional databases. In 2019 and 2020, in the TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks, known as the "World Cup in the Database Field", the world record was topped twice, breaking the world record held by Oracle for 9 years, becoming the only Chinese database product to top the list twice.
Yang Zhenkun and his team focus on their own ** and deeply cultivate technology. Yang Zhenkun's evaluation of himself is: I am not a very smart person, I just focus my energy and time on one point.
Let China's database "stand tall in the sky".
In November 2022, Yang Zhenkun won the highest honor in China's computer industry, the "Wang Xuan Award". But Mr. Yang, 58, prefers to call himself a "digital craftsman" or a "programmer."
A teaching by Mentor Wang Xuan many years ago is the principle of many things he does. Wang Xuan said that to do things, we must stand up to the sky. Dingtian is to make things that are technically superior, and to stand on the ground is to think about how others will use it when doing it.
When Yang Zhenkun was making a domestic database, he required that he must "stand up to the sky". Under this concept, Oceanbase has quickly entered the market with the advantages of high availability, high scalability, high compatibility, high cost performance, and stable security.
According to a report released by the CCID Consulting Software and Information Service Industry Research Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Oceanbase ranks first in the domestic distributed database financial market.
At present, Oceanbase has helped more than 1,000 industry customers achieve digital upgrades, covering domestic and foreign enterprises such as finance, government affairs, energy, operators, transportation, and Internet, and 30% of customers have applied OceanBase to their core systems. 70% of domestic banks with assets of more than 100 billion yuan, 75% of the top ** institutions, 65% of the top insurance institutions, and 45% of the top ** companies have chosen Oceanbase for core system upgrades. Mobile operators in 1 5 provinces and human resources and social security departments in 1 4 provinces across the country are adopting Oceanbase.
As a representative of China's database, Oceanbase's overseas expansion is also accelerating. Up to now, it has provided services in 30 availability zones on the Americas, Europe, and Asia. PalmPay, an African e-wallet, also migrated to the cloud with the help of Oceanbase, reducing database costs by 80%.
Yang Zhenkun said: "We are just a 'game-breaker' in the field of distributed databases, and we still need to overcome many difficulties to open a new situation in the changing situation. Nearly sixty years old, he is still tackling key problems one by one on the front line of technology. One of the challenges on the agenda is how to reduce the recovery time after a database failure. A few years ago, the algorithm designed by Yang Zhenkun for Oceanbase has made the recovery time 30 seconds, which is the world's leading. However, he felt that it was still a little longer, and spent more than a year thinking and meditating to design a new algorithm, hoping to achieve 5 seconds, and the final result was 8 seconds.
Outlook, No. 52, 2023).