What is "root innovation"? Starting from the use of domestic database for bus payment

More than 10 years ago, I graduated and went to work in Guangzhou. The first thing I did when I left the railway station was to go to the roadside newsstand to get a "Yangchengtong" card to use the bus and subway.

Today, there are very few newsstands on the roadside, and "Yangchengtong" has gradually been replaced by mobile payment such as scanning code, NFC, and digital currency. The upgrade of bus payment is only the tip of the iceberg of travel intelligence.

Bus trips are starting to run on the data

Data from iiMedia Research shows that the scale of China's smart transportation technology spending continues to grow. In 2020, China's smart transportation technology spending will reach 50.27 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.26%. It is estimated that China's smart transportation technology spending will reach 58 billion yuan in 2021. , public transport, online car-hailing, and autonomous driving are all developing rapidly.

As the urban travel infrastructure, bus travel is accelerating and intelligent. Bus payment, real-time arrival information query, route planning, vehicle management... all links are combined with digital technology. With the intelligentization of bus travel, more and more data are collected and applied, and today's bus travel is also "running on data". In the digital and intelligent upgrade of bus travel companies, third-party information service providers play an important role, and Xiongdi Technology is one of them.

Founded in 1995, Xiongdi is the world's leading provider of trusted digital identity products and services, providing global governments, institutions, and enterprise users with overall solutions for identity identification and management and big data services centered on trusted digital identity technology. , its business scope covers smart government affairs, smart transportation, smart people's livelihood and other fields.

Xiongdi has been deeply involved in the field of public transportation for decades. Its core business areas cover public transportation, rail transportation and taxis. It provides terminal hardware and The core business platform software, aggregated payment terminals and solutions have covered 200 cities across the country, and the business scope has extended to Hong Kong, Taiwan and other regions.

Since 2019, Xiongdi has expanded the business of public transportation to other fields such as smart scheduling, ERP, active and safe driving, passenger flow analysis, smart stations, electronic stop signs, etc., and has built a smart bus SaaS cloud service platform products around the core business of public transport. It has the characteristics of zero deployment, light operation and maintenance, low cost, security and stability, and rapid application.

In 2020, smart transportation products will be simultaneously innovated and upgraded in technology in the SaaS transformation. One of the important measures is localization replacement. The backend of the business system can be deployed to domestic servers to run, and the operating system is also compatible with domestic mainstream operating systems such as Kylin. Switch to the domestic database OceanBase for the bus payment business.

Why do smart bus service providers do database upgrades?

The foundation of informatization and intelligence is data. As the bottom and core component of an informatization business system, database, together with storage hardware, chips, OS, and servers, constitute an informatization infrastructure. In an exclusive interview with Luo Chao Channel, Dr. Xue Feng, Vice President of Xiongdi, introduced the pain points of using traditional databases in the bus payment business and the logic of Xiongdi's choice of OceanBase.

With the rapid development of mobile payment, public transportation payment methods are becoming more and more diverse, and increasingly complex payment scenarios have higher requirements for the system:

First, the availability of the bus payment system is extremely demanding, and problems with the payment system will directly affect the travel of citizens. Xue Feng believes that bus travel is an information system that is related to people's livelihood, so the real-time and robustness of the database of the bus payment system is very demanding. If there is a problem with the system, not only should the problem be solved quickly, but it should also have minimal impact on urban bus operations.

Second, bus payment is a typical small-value and high-frequency payment application scenario, and the system needs to be accurate and timely in clearing and settlement. Otherwise, it will not only bring economic losses to the bus operating company, but also have a greater social impact; therefore, there are high performance requirements for the underlying database supporting the business system, and at the same time, the real-time, consistency, and accuracy.

Third, public payment systems have peak periods and large concurrency scenarios. In the morning and evening peaks and major events, the database system as the core of the business system needs to improve massive concurrent and online transaction processing capabilities.

Fourth, the bus payment scene is increasingly complex. In addition to the increasing diversification of mobile payment methods, there are also personalized scenarios such as credit card swiping in different places, preferential exemptions for special groups, segmented tolls, and transfer discounts, and the preferential payment policies may change at any time according to government requirements. During the epidemic prevention and control stage, public transportation, as an important prevention and control node, needs to verify the health code and nucleic acid sampling information of passengers. The Xiongdi vehicle payment terminal currently supports the electronic sentinel function, which also requires the back-end database of the public transportation payment system to meet the requirements of high availability. , On the basis of high performance, it needs to have elastic expansion and horizontal expansion capabilities.

OceanBase was born in the cloud era and solves massive data management problems through a native distributed architecture. It adopts a self-developed integrated architecture, taking into account the scalability of the distributed architecture and the performance advantages of the centralized architecture. It has strong data consistency, high availability, high performance, online expansion, high compatibility with SQL standards and mainstream relational databases, and is transparent to applications. High cost performance and other characteristics.

According to Xue Feng, in the past, business systems used traditional databases that required more configuration, which resulted in higher operation and maintenance costs and certain technical thresholds. OceanBase's distributed architecture is the first to introduce city-level disaster recovery in "three places and five centers". The new standard has the characteristics of high availability, high data compression ratio, and multi-copy product architecture, which can better solve the problems we encountered in the complex application scenarios of bus payment.

In the era of digital intelligence, distributed databases have become new infrastructure

The era of digital intelligence has arrived. Whether it is digital or intelligent, the foundation is data. The challenges faced by traditional databases in the digital intelligence era are becoming increasingly severe, while distributed databases have gradually become mainstream, and have a tendency to become the foundation of the digital intelligence era. the reason is:

1. The premise of enterprise digital intelligence is to go to the cloud, and distributed databases are more suitable for the cloud.

The value of cloud has not only solved the problem of IT computing power cost, but has become a model for enterprises to aggregate data, which can be regarded as a prerequisite for online, digital and intelligent transformation and upgrading of enterprises. Therefore, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud, all enterprise organizations are moving business systems to the cloud or even 100% of the cloud.

Enterprises must first migrate their data to the cloud. With the acceleration of industrial digitalization and the explosion of data, it is difficult to continue to use traditional stand-alone databases. The distributed database supports dynamic expansion and is competent for the management and usage scenarios of massive data. Taking OceanBase as an example, as a native distributed database system born in the cloud era, it has the characteristics of "cloud" by nature. The maximum number of connections of an OceanBase cluster depends on how many OBServers are in the cluster. Yes, this can be expanded indefinitely, and can fully support the data management and usage requirements of enterprises under the "data explosion".

Second, the explosion of data, more, more complex, and more fragmented, requires a distributed database to manage.

In the era of digital intelligence, the data of enterprises is larger, more complex, and more fragmented. Using traditional databases is costly, difficult to operate and maintain, and difficult to expand. Distributed databases can be like cloud computing, making database management and use and even analysis a "what you see is what you get" service.

Taking OceanBase as an example, it adheres to the concept of "keep the complexity to yourself and give simplicity to the developers". Although it is a native distributed database, it also insists on giving users a "single-machine experience" that is simple and easy to use. By encapsulating details such as backup, developers do not need to pay attention to data distribution, enabling "zero-perception" dynamic business expansion and "transparent" business data migration, greatly reducing enterprise operation and maintenance costs.

3. User experience is king, and distributed databases keep enterprise services from downtime.

The era of digital intelligence is also an era of onlineization. All walks of life have become accustomed to online business operations. For example, catering companies need to take out food to develop, and taxi drivers need to take orders through an app... It can be said that today's entire world is running on In terms of data, the database system must have the characteristics of high availability, high performance, disaster tolerance, and strong consistency. There are countless cases of business damage caused by database problems. For example, a programmer of Weimob deleted the company's database "delete database" in order to vent his personal anger in the past few years. business failure due to interruption... These all reflect the importance of the database. Distributed databases are inherently multi-node, with strong disaster recovery backup, error correction and recovery capabilities, and high availability, ensuring continuous business lines of enterprises, and providing an insurance for user experience.

To sum up, in the era of digital intelligence, enterprises must make a choice to choose a database that is more suitable for the new era. Switching databases may be a tough decision, but it has to be done, and it's better to do it sooner than later.

Digital intelligence and autonomy are at the right time, and the domestic distributed database is ushering in a good time?

OceanBase was born in the era of big data. In 2010, OceanBase was established by Alipay. At that time, cloud computing was in the ascendant and the Internet was developing rapidly. The original intention of OceanBase was to solve "mass data management" and truly make a "indomitable" general-purpose product. After 12 years of hard work, OceanBase has become a representative of domestic distributed databases.

On the one hand, every line of code in OceanBase is independent and original, and it is not based on any open source database software for secondary packaging and research and development, and truly achieves independent research and development of the core, which allows OceanBase to have an innovative architecture and can continuously break through the technical boundaries; on the other hand, OceanBase is oriented towards It was born from massive data management in the cloud computing era, and constantly tempered itself through real high-pressure scenarios such as Double 11.

Today, 12 years later, OceanBase is just in time.

A "time" is that digital intelligence is in full swing, and distributed databases are the "new infrastructure" in the digital intelligence era. OceanBase has caught up with a good time.

The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan clearly states that it is necessary to promote the deep integration of various industries such as the Internet, big data, and AI, promote the integration of emerging technologies and the real economy, and cultivate and expand new digital application scenarios such as smart manufacturing, smart energy, smart cities, and smart medical care. Digital economy, building digital China. No matter what kind of digital economy is to be developed, "data" is inseparable, and the management and use of "data" relies on database systems.

The second "time" is that autonomy is imminent. As a completely independent database system made in China, OceanBase has caught up with the good time.

In recent years, the world situation has been unpredictable, and national policies have strongly supported independent technologies. As the base of data, the domestic autonomy of the database system is particularly important. Each line of OceanBase code is purely self-developed, and the technology is truly independent and fully controllable. This is also an important reason why it attracts companies such as Xiongdi. Public transportation is related to the national economy and people's livelihood, and obviously cannot be controlled by others. In fact, the banking, insurance, securities, funds, operators, government affairs and people's livelihood, energy, transportation and other industries covered by OceanBase's existing customers all have a strong willingness to replace domestically.

At the 2022 OceanBase annual conference held a few days ago, OceanBase 4.0 was officially released. Its biggest highlight is "inclusive benefit", one is to better support the distributed database needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. Based on the industry's first single-machine distributed integrated architecture, OceanBase 4.0 has the characteristics of "can be large or small". Like Transformers, it can not only meet the application mode of large-scale customers' distributed cluster database, but also meet the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises for single-machine deployment. , which can even run on the world's smallest computer (Raspberry Pi); the other is adapted to more scenarios. OceanBase Cloud, which is launched globally, greatly reduces the threshold for database usage, and can be adapted to more cloud vendors outside of Alibaba Cloud.

write at the end

OceanBase CEO Yang Bing put forward an impressive concept at the OceanBase 4.0 conference: "root innovation" - "China's basic software industry has the ability to 'root innovation', insist on long-term investment, China's database will usher in a big explosion ."

In the past, the Internet and even the technology industry relied on micro-innovation or model innovation. Now this road does not work. What my country needs more is "root innovation" similar to large aircraft, chips, OS, and databases. After all, it is the bottom layer, Independent and original.

OceanBase has always adhered to the concept of "root innovation", and it is not for "innovation" that is not the same, but born from business, excels in business, drives business, and is an innovation that is done in real scenarios.

It is foreseeable that domestic distributed databases will become increasingly mainstream in the next few years, and there will be more technological products with the attributes of "root innovation" in my country, which will help speed up the construction of "Digital China".