Xiang Yongqing entered the General Department of the China Academy of Space Technology in 2010. Over the next seven years, he participated in the development of satellites such as Ziyuan‑1 02D, Ziyuan‑1 03, Gaofen‑2, Gaofen‑3, BeiDou‑2, Chang’e‑5, and more. He is now the CTO of Yuexin Cloud, responsible for product development and team management.
Xiang Yongqing also rose step by step from DBA to entrepreneur and now to a senior technology executive and digital transformation expert. Along the way, he has maintained curiosity about technology; his passion and sense of mission are worth learning from by other DBAs.
Business System Facing Performance Bottlenecks
Under Xiang’s leadership, Yuexin Cloud completed a major move this year: replacing the core business system’s database, finally alleviating a key pain point.
Yuexin Cloud is a subsidiary of Beijing Jinlou Century Technology Co., Ltd., and is an emerging cloud communications service provider in China. Yuexin Cloud focuses on enterprise cloud communication services. After eight years of development and accumulation, it has served thousands of government, large enterprises, financial institutions, and internet companies — including Beijing’s suburban development area, a national ministry, State Grid, China Life, China Post, Kunming Airlines, Lanzhou Bank, Cangzhou Bank, Alibaba, JD, ByteDance, and more.
Yuexin Cloud’s SMS business platform is their core business system. It provides enterprises with a telecom‑operator‑level platform to push SMS messages to target users in real time. Its daily capacity reaches 300 million messages. API response latency is under 30 milliseconds, and a single channel can issue 3,000 messages per second. All this relies on strong backend database support.
“The database needs to store all SMS send records — whether a message was sent successfully, and various downstream status messages. If a customer replies, we must record that too. All of this must be fully logged,” Xiang explained.
As the company’s business grew rapidly, the SMS platform began encountering timeouts and message loss. Storage usage reached the limits of the RDS instance, putting great pressure on the database. Specifically, the database faced these four challenges:
Data volume nearing RDS capacity limits. Once the limit is crossed, scaling becomes troublesome. To postpone this, they periodically delete some data to free up storage. This is cumbersome and risky.
Performance instability due to large data. The database often “stutters,” experiences query timeouts, and increasingly fails to guarantee good performance in queries or batch updates.
Fragmented architecture due to sharding. Because data size was huge, Yuexin Cloud was forced to use a split‑database design — splitting data into two independent databases based on business logic. This design is cumbersome when business requires full data queries: multiple databases must be queried, and results aggregated, leading to inefficiency and poor user experience.
High cost of RDS service. Yuexin Cloud wished to further reduce database operating costs.
Overall, the RDS solution was becoming extremely difficult to optimize or scale. Given that future growth would demand more from query performance and concurrency throughput, replacing the database was deemed urgent.
Migrating from MySQL to OceanBase
Once the decision to replace the database was made, the question became: which database to choose? Given the development of domestic database software in China and national support for “indigenous replacements,” Yuexin Cloud established a guiding principle: choose a domestic database. Then they evaluated mainstream domestic databases on performance, operational cost, and migration difficulty. After thorough evaluation and testing, they settled on the distributed database OceanBase.
“We found that OceanBase had significant advantages in performance and cost. Furthermore, after testing, we discovered that migrating to OceanBase would be smooth with minimal business impact. So ultimately we chose it,” Xiang said.
The results after running OceanBase proved the correctness of their decision. Xiang was especially impressed with three major strengths of OceanBase:
High query efficiency — greatly improving user experience. In most application scenarios, OceanBase’s performance is on average 10× that of their prior MySQL architecture.
Storage savings — OceanBase uses compression techniques, dramatically reducing storage usage. According to Yuexin Cloud’s estimates, it saves at least 70% of storage space.
Dynamic scaling capability — This was a key reason for replacing MySQL in the first place. The capacity ceiling was gone after moving to OceanBase. Scaling is very easy: minimal manual intervention — just a few commands, and the system handles scaling automatically.
“This automatic scaling ability is critical to our business. We frequently have large‑scale promotion events, where resource consumption can multiply. Being able to scale up and down in time helps us save significant cost,” Xiang said.
Xiang admits he faced considerable pressure before the switchover.
“At first I was worried this approach might be risky. Looking back, the process went quite smoothly, and business support has been strong. It is a successful and proud case.”
Domestic Databases Enter a Period of Opportunity
As Yuexin Cloud’s CTO and the person responsible for the database decision, Xiang is not a stranger to databases. Throughout his career he has consistently engaged with them. Xiang holds a degree in Software Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology — he chose this major after careful consideration. During his high school years, his math scores were strong. After analyzing the job market, he decided that software engineering would allow his math strength to shine and offered good employment prospects.
Databases are a basic course in software engineering, but the classroom covers mainly theory. Xiang first encountered large-scale databases during his graduate studies at Peking University. Later in his work, he came into contact with many domestic databases (beyond Oracle, MySQL), including Renmin University’s Kingbase, Dameng, Nanda Tongyong, and Shenzhou Tongruan. The migration from MySQL to OceanBase deepened his understanding of domestic (Chinese) databases.
“We’ve seen great progress in domestic databases in recent years. The government is giving more attention and has introduced many policies. Chinese enterprises have gained more recognition of domestic databases. Thanks in part to the ‘Xinchuang’ (trusted computing) initiative, domestic software like databases have many more opportunities and some critical systems have completed indigenous replacement. In all respects — technology, market, talent — domestic databases have seen obvious improvement,” Xiang said.
He sees distributed databases as particularly striking among domestic offerings. Xiang says distributed DB technology is the direction of the future, because in concurrency, throughput, and performance, distributed systems offer clear advantages. This was a major premise for Yuexin Cloud selecting OceanBase.
“Particularly in data‑heavy industries and domains — such as internet finance or sectors with high real-time demands, even industrial internet — if data volumes are massive and the requirement for real-time processing is high, distributed databases will be the applicable scenario,” Xiang said.
Tilting Toward Business, Amplifying DBA Value
In recent years, trends like cloud computing, distributed technologies, and the Xinchuang movement have brought new changes to China’s database industry. As a tech expert, Xiang is keenly aware of these shifts. He says these changes present both challenges and opportunities for DBAs. But regardless of era, one constant remains: foundational knowledge must be solid.
“A DBA is a comprehensive role. You must interact with many technical teams — development, testing, operations — so your knowledge must be broad,” Xiang said.
First, as a DBA, knowledge in databases is essential: indexing, query optimization, features usage, etc. But a DBA must also master other foundational computer science knowledge — operating systems, data structures, networking, algorithms. A solid foundation allows later application development and engineering work to be smoother, and prepares one for better career growth.
Second, a DBA must be familiar with business. “Data is really a reflection of business. If you don’t know the business well, you can’t propose good database architecture or solutions, nor quickly pinpoint and address performance or other issues in the DB,” Xiang said.
Third, a DBA must possess coding ability — not only writing scripts but potentially participating in application development. DBAs should also understand typical data middleware (e.g. ETL tools, messaging middleware such as Kafka, Redis etc.).
Fourth, a DBA sits between development and operations, so operational skills are also required — particularly database-related ops: log backup & cleanup strategies, data backup policies, online/offline data synchronization strategies, and so on.
Xiang emphasizes that much of a DBA’s future value will lie in research & development tasks, supporting data demands on the business side. Only then will the DBA’s value be magnified.
Maintain Curiosity, Persist in Learning
Xiang feels fortunate to live in this era, saying:
“Today is a time when technical engineers can truly shine.”
This era has produced many technical stars who, through their own ability, have advanced society. Xiang greatly admires such figures — for example, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, who at age 20 won a global technology award over Zuckerberg. And Linus Torvalds, “the father of Linux,” whom Xiang deeply respects. Even though his current work doesn’t directly relate to Linux, he is subscribed to Linux project updates on GitHub and receives notifications of changes.
Seeing the trajectories of Linus, others who remain active in tech, Xiang becomes even more convinced that programming is a lifelong profession — one of great accomplishment and value — and he deeply enjoys it.
“I feel the growth and cultivation of technology is a very interesting process. Each stage brings new insights, new thinking, which spur you to grow and move toward the next phase,” Xiang said.
He believes technical professionals shouldn’t worry about the so-called “age‑35 barrier,” but instead maintain curiosity and continue learning.
“I think the 35‑year threshold actually doesn’t exist. If you reach 35 and stop improving, stop learning, stop refreshing your knowledge, that’s on you — not society,” Xiang said.
Xiang reveals he is currently focused on two things: (1) how he can contribute to the growth of China’s software industry, playing a role in advancing it; and (2) continuing to improve both his technical skills and management capabilities. On the technical side, he is especially focused on architecture — particularly high-concurrency system design; on the management side, he wants to motivate team members so each can reach their fullest potential.
Xiang says that as a technologist, one must have a sense of mission.
“Currently there are relatively few truly outstanding domestic software products. Chinese programmers thus have a long, important road ahead. But I believe, step by step, the Chinese software industry will one day lead the world just as manufacturing does today. As a technical person, I hope I can contribute a bit to China’s software industry,” he said.
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