Technical Analysis of OceanBase TPC-C Benchmark and Link‑Layer Optimizations
This article details OceanBase’s achievement in the TPC‑C benchmark, explaining the test architecture, the role of ODBC and OBProxy, and the various link‑layer performance, resource, and durability optimizations that enable high throughput and continuous service in a distributed database environment.
The Ant Financial self‑developed database OceanBase topped the TPC‑C benchmark, prompting a technical deep‑dive that is presented as a six‑part series. This final part focuses on the link‑layer components and their optimizations.
In a TPC‑C test the system is split into a Remote Terminal Emulator (RTE) and a System Under Test (SUT). The SUT consists of a Web Application Server (WAS), the OceanBase Proxy (OBProxy) and the OceanBase Server (OBServer). RTE clients generate 96 million transactions across 64 cloud servers, while requests flow from WAS → ODBC → OBProxy → OBServer.
OceanBase provides an ODBC interface that integrates directly into the WAS, allowing seamless migration from other databases.
OBProxy acts as a stateless routing and fail‑over layer, aware of data replicas and partition rules, forwarding SQL to the optimal OBServer without participating in query planning.
Link‑layer performance is improved through several techniques:
Asynchronous ODBC interface: WAS can issue new requests without waiting for previous results, reducing thread contention and increasing throughput.
Prepared Statement support: Binary request protocol caches parsed statements, enabling fast reuse and reducing CPU overhead.
Stored Procedure optimization: OBProxy parses procedures, routes sub‑queries to the best OBServer, and caches results to minimize remote executions.
Complex type handling: Extended transmission protocol supports arrays and other complex data, improving data density and routing decisions.
OBProxy’s resource consumption is modest: deployed on 64 client machines using 10 cores each (≈7 % of total CPU cost) while delivering up to 50 k QPS per core with sub‑50 µs latency.
For durability, OBProxy maintains black‑ and gray‑lists to automatically bypass or retry failing OBServers, ensuring continuous service even during forced power‑off tests.
Overall, OceanBase’s link‑layer design delivers a high‑performance, highly available database solution, and future work will further refine the transport protocol and standard interfaces.
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