DBMS from scratch. In the beginning, he came up with three key principles for their new product: (1) distributed (2) low cost (3) high reliability.

In 2013, Alipay decided to stop using Oracle. Since the alternative MySQL cannot guarantee the strong consistency of the master and backup, OceanBase took the lead. Since then, OceanBase is no longer open source.

From 2014 to 2016, the team spent three years developing OceanBase. Beginning in 2017, OceanBase began to provide external services.

OceanBase adopts a consistent non-blocking checkpoint mechanism. Their team is currently working on developing a fuzzy non-blocking checkpointing mechanism implemented as an LSM tree structure.

OceanBase uses columnar compression. It implements multiple encoding algorithms and automatically chooses the most suitable one for each column. It employs column compression to take advantage of data similarities such as same data type, same range of values, etc.

OceanBase uses MVCC for concurrency control. If the operation involves a single partition or multiple partitions on a single server node, it will read that server node's snapshot. Perform distributed snapshot reads if the operation involves partitions on multiple server nodes.