In recent years, domestic databases have sprung up, and there are domestic database products like AntDB that have been polished for many years in application scenarios, and there are also various emerging databases such as graph databases and temporal databases, etc. Domestic databases are just getting started, and the current situation and future of domestic databases have become an important topic for all walks of life. Today, we will discuss the development of domestic database through the 14-year evolution of AntDB.

Domestic database born out of special scenario needs

In the past 40 years, the development of any industry is inseparable from the demographic dividend, and the domestic database is no exception, because the huge population base and the rapidly developing communication needs for the whole country and the whole world have brought about application scenarios with unique Chinese characteristics.

On the one hand, China entered the era of second-generation mobile communication services at the end of the 1990s, and the 21st century has ushered in a period of rapid development: 43.3 million cell phone users in early 2000, and 393 million by the end of 2005, with a compound annual growth rate of 55.4%. On the other hand, compared with the expensive voice, simple SMS was sought after, and at the same time, Internet services began to sprout, and various SP services blossomed everywhere.

The sudden increase in the volume of users and services in a short period of time put forward nearly demanding requirements on the support systems of the communications industry at that time, especially the core billing and accounting system: the backlog of phone orders could not exceed 5 minutes, and the system needed to be loaded with at least 5 to 6 times the total amount of current services ...... Such data and information processing requirements were unprecedented in the world and pretty Chinese-style.

The traditional database bred in European and American markets could not meet the data management demand of this volume, especially when dealing with some core application scenarios (e.g. billing, signaling analysis, etc.), it could not meet the throughput and responsiveness of data processing.

According to the R&D engineer of the first generation of AntDB, based on the communication demand of a super province, the R&D team of AsiaInfo was “commissioned", and without any experience and products to refer to, they gnawed textbooks little by little, wrote code line by line, then ran the system for testing, and worked overtime to grind the product, and finally, on the basis of telecom-level high availability, the throughput rate and response time of the whole transaction processing were improved by an order of magnitude compared with the mainstream foreign databases, and the first-generation  AntDB, the in-memory database was born.

In addition to factors such as the important strategic position of the database itself to the country and the organization, and the positive market trend, it can be said that the unique Chinese scenario needs directly gave birth to the first batch of domestic database products born in the production environment.

Rapidly advancing Internet technology accelerates the iteration and upgrade of domestic databases

From 3G to 4G then to 5G, with the upgrade of technology development comes various hardware and software innovations. The popularization of smartphones and the birth of new applications such as social shopping and entertainment result the reality that the range of Chinese mobile internet users covers the whole age group.

In the 2G era, communication billing mainly focused on calls and SMS, and the form of data was relatively simple. 3G~5G era, every click and every behavior of users will generate corresponding data, which is no longer just the link data between people and people, but also the data between people and things, and the data between things and things, that is, the data of multi-dimensional interconnection of all things.

In the scenario where massive data can be born every moment, how to ensure that no data is lost while pursuing speed has become a new challenge for the database.

AntDB as the representative product of domestic database, its R&D team has been accurately grasping the development trend of technology and applying the most cutting-edge database technology to the product to meet the needs of more complex and high-density data processing scenarios that may appear in the future.

Figure 1 the evolution of AntDB

With the iteration of communication technology, AntDB has also "kept pace with the times" and completed the "three-step jump": from in-memory database to full-featured, general-purpose relational database, to a full-stack database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL open source ecology and highly compatible with foreign mainstream databases, and further to distributed, multi-model cloud-native database.

In the face of increasingly complex mixed load scenarios and mixed data type business needs in the future, and considering the increasingly demanding data needs of users in real-time processing scenarios such as real-time analysis and real-time reporting, and asynchronous transaction scenarios such as Internet+, AntDB has proposed a new concept of "hyper-convergence" and "stream-batch integration" based on the overall architecture to evolve into a future-oriented database. In the future, AntDB will continue to evolve based on new cutting-edge technologies and application scenarios, and continue to iterate and upgrade.

Where should the domestic database go under the support of information innovation policy?

If, before 2019, due to the survival space being squeezed by foreign vendors, the domestic database was more to meet the demand for self-consumption, then with the support of information innovation policy, the database market has become a battlefield for the vendors. AntDB team believes that the future of the domestic database does not lie in trying to surpass some international brand database, but in finding our own way to developing better based on our own strengths (unique Chinese  scenarios, responsibility to national security and society, a group of engineers growing up, etc.).

So, what has AntDB done for information innovation?

First of all, AntDB's storage and execution engines are its own technology, with every line of code originating from its own team of engineers.

Second, multimodal AntDB, compatible with SQL engine and highly compatible with Oracle, fully integrates with PostgreSQL, MySQL ecosystem. With the multi-syntax SQL parsing engine design that can be customized and extended by customer, a set of database can meet the nationalization replacement requirements of a variety of foreign databases. The ecology system of perfect DBA and de-O support tools can deduce customers’ costs of learning and operation and maintenance.

Third, AntDB is actively adapting to information innovation ecosystem, supporting many domestic chips and operating systems and adapting to domestic third-party tools.

In addition, as a member of the Information Innovation Working Committee, AsiaInfo actively promotes information innovation testing, and the code autonomy rate of AntDB exceeds 90%.

In the field of domestic database, the facts that whether we have core technology independent of others, whether the product can be polished in real production environment, whether we have sufficient resources to continuously invest, and whether it can integrate into domestic ecology are critical to decide if database vendors can go further, and are also the direction for the development of domestic database.

About AntDB

As a general-purpose database product with self-developed kernel that has 14-year experience in communication market, AntDB has four salient features:

Amount - A huge number of users. More than 1 billion mobile phone owners using AntDB in the background.

History - Long time of implementation. AntDB has gone through 14 years of trials and tribulations since its implementation in billing system in 2008.

Speed - Fast execution performance. All the call records and every message first sent on the Internet in the telecom business need the support of AntDB in the background, and AntDB can handle millions of core telecom transactions per second at its peak.

Stability - Stable and reliable products. AntDB has been running smoothly, safely in the core system of telecom operators for more than ten years.

So far, AntDB has been implemented for commercial purpose in communication, finance, transportation, energy, Internet of Things and other industries. In the future, AntDB team will continue to adhere to the concept of independent innovation, continuously improve the existing R&D system, enhance its own management level, technical level and innovation level, and continue to provide more mature and high-quality products and services to customers in the industry.