Introduction to Lizhe, researcher of Alibaba Group, head of database OLAP product department. Li Zhe said that the origin of this fancy name is a character in a martial arts novel. He is not the kind of talented person, but with his persistence and hard work, he finally reached the top. On the battlefield of cloud technology, the database is the new battlefield where the core technology fights the most intense. In Ali, Lizhe always adheres to the long-term technical attitude, and finally leads the R&D team. The products developed by the cloud native data warehouse AnalyticDB and cloud native data lake analysis Dala Lake Analytics have been widely used and won the first prize of Zhejiang Science and Technology Progress Award. Also completed a counterattack on the TPC list.
He joined Alibaba in 2011 and has been engaged in data warehouse and data lake basic platform research, R&D, and productization related work for nearly 10 years. At present, the Alibaba Cloud Database Division is mainly responsible for the research and development of data warehouse and data lake related products; researcher of the database and storage laboratory of Dharma Academy.
You may be a little unfamiliar with the term database, but in fact, behind all modern life, there are database services hidden. Every time you spend, every stock transaction, every Weibo dynamic, you can't do without the database.
The development of mankind is closely related to data. In the earliest days of mankind, we started with knotting notes; later, we could record the words on oracle bone inscriptions; and then we started to have computers. Since the birth of mankind, mankind has been recording information continuously, which is actually the embryonic form of the database.
In the 1960 Apollo mission to the moon, NASA, in order to record all the information during the entire aerospace process, jointly developed the first-generation database-IMS with IBM. Then database technology began to enter the civilian field and was widely used.
Q: Why did you choose to join Ali?
Zhan Chaoqun: It should have been around 11 years. At that time, I knew a lot of friends on Taobao. At that time, Taobao was also developing very fast. I remember that in 2011, Taobao’s daily independent UV exceeded 120 million, and then I thought that Taobao might have the most opportunity to achieve a very important technological breakthrough.
Q: Have you encountered any difficulties in working at Ali for nearly ten years?
Zhan Chaoqun: The most impressive dilemma was in the first five months when the supervisor asked me to be online in two months. But I haven't been online for five months. At that time there was the first conflict of ideas.
In fact, the supervisor asked me to build a data processing technology that serves a single business, but it can’t be called a database system. He said that it’s enough for you to do this well. I told the supervisor that this matter is not a module serving a single business, but a platform-based design and platform-based system. The two of us talked for a long time, and in the end I felt very lucky. We still reached an agreement. The supervisor felt that this matter was valuable.
So on the first day, I followed the form of a database to push back what I should do today. Taking into account the description language (SQL), optimizer, storage engine, and execution engine, I supported one to two to 20 businesses from the beginning. To today's more than 500, the analysis business of the group is basically covered.
Q: In 2019, Alibaba's AnalyticDB database topped the TPC-DS list, finally breaking the dominance of Oracle and Microsoft in the database field. How did you think you want to hit the TPC list?
Zhan Chaoqun: In October 18th, I remember that in one night, I pulled a few core backbones of the team. I said that we were going to attack TPC, polish our end-to-end technology, and implement the ultimate and strict in accordance with international standards. Harsh end-to-end verification.
At that time, they were all opposed to it. After reading the report, they felt that many things could not be understood, and even the first reaction did not fully understand what was behind the scenes. What technology should be used to solve it? In fact, the challenges in this are great, but I said that we must go to this matter. I said that this is a very important leap point and technical verification point for us. The generalization of these technologies can polish products well, and it will also affect customers. Produce great value.
Q: Many people may think that you are going to challenge a long-term database technology list monopolized by foreign giants. You have set yourself an overly high goal. Have you ever thought of giving up halfway through?
Zhan Chaoqun: I am very firm. But the process is really painful. I spent most of my time in the project room or holding phone meetings with everyone, digging out the details one by one and reviewing the architecture one by one.
Q: What are the similarities between the walking tour and the impact TPC?
Zhan Chaoqun: I have walked once before, that is, I have been to Xuanzang Road. The thing that impresses me in my life is the third day of hiking. The end point is a windmill town. You can see the end point from the camping place, but You can't go any way. When I set off, I was very happy and felt that I could see the end in a short time. It should be completed soon, but when I walked to noon, they said that you were less than halfway there, so many people gave up that day and just halfway through. Give up; I also feel particularly uncomfortable when I am halfway there.
I rested for a long time halfway, and I wanted to give up. Because I have a character for so many years, no matter how difficult it is, as long as I decide, whether I climb over or walk over, but I must go to the end. So I took a very long break in the middle, and then I got up and walked again. I remembered that I walked to the end when it was dark.
This is how we feel about going international. You know who the opponent is and how he has done it, but you just don’t know how to go. You just run for a while and find that this period of opponents has been through five years ago. After running for a while, I found that the opponent had walked seven years ago. This feeling is actually very exciting and desperate.
In the end, in April 2019, we formally completed it, and the effect was still very good, and we won the world's first performance and cost-effective.
Q: Every industrial revolution is accompanied by the change of infrastructure, and in the field of database, there is also such a huge technological change from old to new, from traditional to cloud. What do you think of this change?
Zhan Chaoqun: Cloud computing is actually reconstructing the entire database architecture. What was the structure of the database in the past? Disk, CPU, and memory are all stand-alone machines. Either Scale up expands stand-alone resources such as memory, or Scale out expands the number of physical machines. But what will happen to cloud computing infrastructure changes today? Storage can be shared and paid on demand, and computing can also be elastically expanded in accordance with real-time requests. It has changed the entire system structure. Cloud native plus distributed technology is a huge opportunity for the database. This thing is actually a new track where we have the most chance to surpass foreign manufacturers at present.
Q: You total hiring how many people?
Zhan Chaoqun: I think there should be more than 1500 people in the system. Whether it is Xia Kexing or Hundred Years Ali, they have attended many classes.
Q: What are your criteria for selecting candidates?
Zhan Chaoqun: Actually, many people can't distinguish what is knowledge, what is experience, what is ability, and what is potential. For example, I read a book or a paper, which can only be called knowledge; then I do something and use this knowledge, which is called experience. What is the ability? That is to say, the technology and experience that I have summed up from doing this thing, I copied in the B, C, D, E projects, this is called ability. Based on these abilities, I can do well even when facing an unknown. This is called potential. This is something we need to dig deeper, because we face many unknown challenges that need more people to solve together.
Q: Do you have any special decompression method?
Zhan Chaoqun: The longer I stay, the inertia of thinking and execution will gradually form, and the spirit and courage that I had just joined the job will be lost. This is one of the things I fear most. When I was in Xixi Park before, at that time, for example, when I was faced with some pressure or had great challenges and choices, I would look at the statue in Hall Nine, and think about whether I carried too much baggage.
In fact, like everyone else, I grew up from a grassroots classmate. In the process, I will encounter a lot of grievances, including the boss's not necessarily understanding, including being denied and criticized by the business side, including various internal and external technical PKs, this In the process, I also experienced a lot of inner entanglement and hesitation.
Many times I also thought about giving up. But in this process, for example, our technology uses the urban brain to make the city safer and makes the city more efficient in governance; the technology uses postal services to make the entire postal logistics more efficient. In fact, there are very big technological breakthroughs and innovations behind them. These technologies are changing people's livelihood step by step, supporting the digitalization of enterprises, carrying the trust and entrustment of many customers to us, and allowing many beautiful things to happen. These are the biggest motivations that allow me to persevere in many times, when I am wronged and hesitated.
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