In 2021, the government work report took "scientific and technological self-reliance and self-improvement" as the strategic support for national development, and actively promoted the solution of "bottleneck issues" in key technologies. Facing the goal of financial digitization and high-quality development, financial institutions were now faced with the upgrading of structure and infrastructure by taking into account the problems of security and digital development.

New Opportunities for Database Localization

In recent years, the wave of innovation has been surging. "Information security is the cornerstone of national security" and is reshaping major industrial chains, and databases, as the underlying software and core support for the digital transformation of government and enterprises, are of great significance for the implementation of national security strategies and the improvement of overall competitiveness. In the environment of iterative development of open-source technology and cloud computing technology, the replacement of database localization is imperative.

Bank of Nanjing just celebrated its 26th birthday and is exploring its own practical path in this wave. As the second-largest local bank in Jiangsu, Bank of Nanjing has long been actively involved in major national, regional and local strategic plans. Under the guidance of the "Five-Year" FinTech Plan, Bank of Nanjing actively deploys the frontier FinTech field, promotes technology-led, data-driven, comprehensive empowerment of business and management, and accelerates the transformation to a "digital and intelligent" bank.

The rapid growth of data generation and data traffic brought about by the digital age has put forward requirements for databases such as faster access speed, stronger scalability, and support for higher concurrent access volumes. The traditional centralized database is facing increasing pressure, and establishing a highly available, highly secure, and intelligent database has become the key for the Bank of Nanjing to support the continuous development of the Bank’s new businesses.

Under the dual forces of policy and market changes, in October 2021, the Bank of Nanjing officially launched the "OLAP Distributed Domestic Database Construction Project" to build a data platform based on domestic distributed databases.

Building a "safety base" for digital transformation

As the "safety base" for the digital transformation of financial institutions, the database is closely related to the many application systems of the bank. Replacing the database itself has multiple risks such as a stable operation to be verified, heavy migration and transformation tasks, and a difficult selection of multiple scenarios. Therefore, in the face of numerous and complex database types, how to choose a domestic database that is most suitable for your own business development is undoubtedly the primary problem to be solved.

At this time, an experienced and capable "best partner" is particularly important.

As a leader in the security and controllability of financial digitalization, Sunline has taken the lead in entering the market in the field of innovation. Relying on self-developed core technologies and products, it has cooperated with various domestic database suppliers and has landed projects for many domestic joint-stock banks and city commercial banks, setting many industry benchmarks for China's banking industry to realize the replacement of domestic databases from 0 to 1.

After sufficient pre-research, communications, and discussions on the needs in the early stage, combined with Bank of Nanjing's own business structure, business data volume, data type, etc., Sunline has created a solution for the bank based on the Huawei GaussDB distributed database with analysis and mixed load capabilities with a set of advanced database cluster and cloud database, successfully winning the OLAP distributed domestic database construction project of Bank of Nanjing.

Starting from the current situation and future planning of Bank of Nanjing's data system construction, this solution has laid a solid foundation for its database localization replacement in multiple dimensions:

1. Planned the GaussDB cluster deployment scheme design and cluster architecture suitable for the Bank of Nanjing.

2. Built a cluster environment that satisfies load balancing, high availability, and disaster tolerance.

3. Compiled design and development specifications such as "ETL Script Development Specification", which provided guidelines for the subsequent construction and maintenance of the Gauss platform.

4. Provided technical support such as cluster performance tuning and SQL optimization to ensure the smooth operation of the platform.

Real capabilities are the foundation

In December 2021, the OLAP distributed domestic database construction project for the Bank of Nanjing was successfully launched, taking only two months to complete the project.

During the period, the Sunline project team completed the cluster planning and design, deployed in four environments of development, SIT, UAT, and production. Time is tight and tasks are heavy but the team was "not afraid of difficulties or avoiding responsibility" and the positive work attitude has enabled the project implementation to progress fast and steadily. Even when the schedule was most intense, the members of the group will make time every day to communicate the problems encountered and work together to find specific solutions.

The project team's spirit is in lieu of the innovation-driven wave. After the project was launched, data applications such as the regulatory submission market have also been migrated to the GaussDB cluster platform. With the stable operation of the GaussDB cluster, more applications will be gradually migrated. The good performance of the system provides strong support for the business development of Bank of Nanjing with:

1. High-performance guarantee with the characteristics of high scalability, high performance, and high availability, which can well meet the needs of online, high-frequency, multi-dimensional, and high-concurrency scenarios and facilitate business innovation.

2. Low cost to performance, optimizing the Bank’s IT asset allocation, reducing investment and operation and maintenance costs with increased efficiency.

3. High security to meet the national requirements for independent and controllable financial security and escort digital transformation as a financial-level distributed database with independent and controllable technology and intellectual property rights.

Standing at the current node of the times, the practice of innovation-driven in domestic financial institutions has entered a stage of the full swing. The successful launch of the distributed domestic database of Bank of Nanjing is not only a big step in its digital transformation journey but also sets a benchmark for many small and medium-sized banks that are exploring the field of domestic database replacement. As the "operator" of this project, Sunline has given full play to its advantages in independent innovation and safe and controllable application practice of financial IT systems. In the future, as a firm supporter and practitioner of the national credit innovation strategy, Sunline will continue to explore new technologies, new formats, and new models, and empower the high-quality development of China's financial credit innovation infrastructure with technological innovation!