What is OceanBase used for?

OceanBase is a distributed relational database developed by Ant Group, MySQL-compatible and built on Paxos, supporting transactional, analytical and vector workloads. It is a good fit for scaling MySQL-compatible workloads, mixed OLTP and analytics on one engine, and vector search alongside relational data.

Is OceanBase open source?

Yes. OceanBase is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at oceanbase/oceanbase and is written mainly in C++.

Yes. OceanBase is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host OceanBase?

Yes. OceanBase can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is OceanBase an alternative to?

OceanBase is an open-source alternative to Oracle Database, Amazon Aurora, CockroachDB and IBM Db2. Other open-source alternatives to Oracle Database include MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL.

Is OceanBase actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to OceanBase was on 1 October 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.

OceanBase: open-source alternative to Oracle Database

About OceanBase

OceanBase is a distributed relational database developed by Ant Group. It runs on a cluster of commodity servers and uses the Paxos protocol and a distributed architecture to provide high availability and scalability, without depending on a specific hardware architecture.

It is compatible with MySQL, which eases migration from MySQL databases, and supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing, so one engine can serve both OLTP and OLAP workloads. The project now describes itself as a unified, multi-model database for the AI era, with topics that include vector search and full-text search. Cloud-native operation is supported through a Kubernetes operator.

You can try it by deploying a stand-alone instance with an all-in-one package on Linux, starting a Docker container from images on Docker Hub, quay.io or ghcr.io, or running it on Kubernetes with ob-operator. OceanBase is written in C++ and licensed under Apache-2.0, with a developer guide for compiling the observer yourself.

Key features

Distributed architecture on Paxos
Compatible with MySQL applications
Hybrid transactional and analytical processing
Vector and full-text search
Docker and Kubernetes deployment
All-in-one stand-alone installer

Good fit for

→Scaling MySQL-compatible workloads
→Mixed OLTP and analytics on one engine
→Vector search alongside relational data

Built with: C++; MySQL
Tags: distributed-database; mysql-compatible; htap; paxos; oltp; olap; vector-search; cloud-native; database

OceanBase: questions and answers

What is OceanBase used for?: OceanBase is a distributed relational database developed by Ant Group, MySQL-compatible and built on Paxos, supporting transactional, analytical and vector workloads. It is a good fit for scaling MySQL-compatible workloads, mixed OLTP and analytics on one engine, and vector search alongside relational data.
Is OceanBase open source?: Yes. OceanBase is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at oceanbase/oceanbase and is written mainly in C++.
Is OceanBase free?: Yes. OceanBase is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host OceanBase?: Yes. OceanBase can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is OceanBase an alternative to?: OceanBase is an open-source alternative to Oracle Database, Amazon Aurora, CockroachDB and IBM Db2. Other open-source alternatives to Oracle Database include MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL.
Is OceanBase actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to OceanBase was on 1 October 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.