OceanBase Sets New TPC‑C Record with 707 Million tpmC, Showcasing Linear Scalability and Cost Efficiency

On May 20, Ant Financial’s fully self‑developed distributed relational database OceanBase broke its own TPC‑C record by reaching 707,351,007 tpmC, surpassing the previous 60,880,800 tpmC benchmark set in October 2019.

The TPC‑C benchmark tests both functionality and performance of OLTP systems, requiring ACID‑compliant distributed transactions that involve up to 15 nodes per transaction.

Scalability : The first‑phase test used 207 servers; the second‑phase expanded to 1,557 servers, showing almost linear performance growth. Single‑node warehouse count increased from 23,500 to 36,000, and the theoretical per‑node peak rose from 300,800 to 460,800 tpmC.

Single‑node performance : Optimizations to SQL expression evaluation, large‑partition pruning, and stored procedures raised average per‑node tpmC by about 50 % (from 300k to ~460k). Hardware upgrades from 64 vCPU to 84 vCPU ECS instances contributed an additional 20 % gain.

Parallel query : With a 6 PB data set (≈20 trillion rows in the largest table), the parallel query engine used a concurrency of over 45,000, completing full‑table scans in minutes and most queries in seconds.

Cost efficiency : By running entirely on Alibaba Cloud ECS instances, OceanBase reduced the cost per tpmC to CNY 3.98, more than one‑third lower than the previous test and cheaper than Oracle‑RAC’s USD 1.01 per tpmC, while still providing higher reliability through multi‑replica Paxos.

The results illustrate that a cloud‑native distributed database can achieve high performance, linear scalability, and superior price‑performance without relying on specialized high‑end hardware.

Oracle‑RAC

OceanBase Phase 1

OceanBase Phase 2

tpmC

30.25 M

60.88 M

707 M

Hardware

27 x T3‑4 Sparc (13,824 HT)

207 x x86 VM (13,238 HT)

1,557 x x86 VM (130,788 HT)

Price/tpmC

USD 1.01

CNY 6.25

CNY 3.98