OceanBase Tops the TPC‑C Benchmark: Process, Significance, and Technical Insights

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non‑profit organization that defines industry‑standard benchmarks for evaluating the performance and cost‑effectiveness of database systems. TPC‑C, its benchmark for online transaction processing (OLTP), is widely used by financial, telecom, and government customers to compare database vendors.

On October 2, Ant Financial announced that its self‑developed database OceanBase achieved the #1 position on the latest TPC‑C leaderboard. This marks the first time a Chinese company has entered the top tier, highlighting OceanBase’s world‑class transaction processing capability.

The TPC‑C certification process is extremely strict. It consists of three stages: (1) a preparation phase where the vendor implements all required features and optimizations while clarifying every specification item with auditors; (2) an on‑site pre‑audit at OceanBase’s Hangzhou headquarters, covering functional, ACID, performance, failover tests, architecture and code reviews, and cost calculations; (3) a final audit where all issues from the pre‑audit are resolved, the full disclosure report (FDR) is produced, and results are submitted to the TPC technical committee.

Performance is measured in tpmC (transactions per minute for the New‑Order transaction), while cost‑effectiveness is expressed as price/tpmC. OceanBase’s test used 204 Alibaba Cloud ECS i2 instances, achieving stable performance for eight hours with less than 2 % variance, meeting the benchmark’s stringent stability and disaster‑recovery requirements.

The benchmark also evaluates total hardware and software costs over three years. Unlike competitors that purchase dedicated high‑end servers, OceanBase leveraged commodity cloud servers, resulting in a hardware cost share of under 18 % of the total price, dramatically improving its price/tpmC ratio.

Key technical observations include the importance of distributed transaction support (10 % New‑Order and 15 % Payment distributed transactions) and the fact that simply adding CPU cores does not linearly increase TPC‑C performance; efficient distributed transaction processing is essential.

OceanBase’s success is attributed to years of high‑concurrency experience from Alibaba’s “Double‑11” shopping festival, which provided a real‑world training ground for its distributed architecture.

Domestic database vendors’ participation in TPC demonstrates growing confidence in Chinese technology and the drive toward global competitiveness. OceanBase plans to open‑source its TPC‑C testing tools to help other vendors achieve certified results.

Currently, OceanBase 2.2 offers Oracle compatibility, with ongoing work to enhance the distributed optimizer and execution engine, facilitating migration from Oracle for both Alibaba’s internal services and external banking customers.