Exploring Database Operations Automation at Tiancheng Financial – Interview with Senior DBA Ge Haoqiang
In this interview, senior DBA Ge Haoqiang from Tiancheng Financial discusses the scale of their database clusters, the efficiency gains from automation, DevOps culture, language choices, and how they adapt to new database features, offering insights into modern database operations automation.
On April 25, the 3306π community hosted an online technical sharing session featuring a special interview titled “Exploring Database Operations Automation at Tiancheng Financial.”
Speaker Introduction
Ge Haoqiang, senior database operations engineer at Tiancheng Financial, has extensive experience in database operations and leads the design and development of their automation platform.
Topic : “The Road to Database Operations Automation at Tiancheng Financial.”
Interview
Q1: What is the scale of the database clusters managed by the automation platform?
A: Over 2,000 servers are integrated, covering relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL, NoSQL databases like Redis and MongoDB, and distributed TiDB.
Q2: How much has work efficiency improved after introducing automation?
A: Prior to automation, more than 70% of operations staff were occupied with ticket review, environment deployment, and data migration. After automation, basic tasks are handled by the platform, freeing roughly half of the staff to focus on new technologies. Personnel reduced from over 30 DBAs managing 200+ instances to 8 DBAs managing 4,000+ instances.
Q3: What advice does he have for DBAs wanting to enter DevOps, including language choices?
A: Emphasize culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS). Adopt a systematic, global mindset and habit of solving problems through automation. For languages, Java remains mainstream, Python offers rapid development, and Go provides high concurrency; he personally prefers Go.
Q4: Will automation keep pace with rapid database feature updates such as MySQL 8.0’s clone plugin?
A: The team evaluates new features and incorporates suitable ones, handling compatibility when platform logic changes, but prioritizes production stability over chasing every new feature.
Case Studies
Examples include collaborations with China Merchants Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, where the company helped build MySQL operation standards, integrate cloud platforms, and achieve significant performance and cost improvements.
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