In The Chinese market, the development of distributed database is in the “outbreak period”. From the perspective of patent application data, the number of patent applications related to distributed database in China climbed from 22% in 2012 to 76% in 2021, and China has become the technological innovation center of distributed database in the world.
“My dream is to bring the next generation of distributed databases to as many enterprises as possible.” Ye Jianlin, an entrepreneur from Hangzhou, China, has a clear and determined goal. After seven years of work, programmer Ye Jianlin produced more than 5 million lines of code, worth 100 million yuan, before leaving China’s Internet giant Alibaba to set up data technology company AtomData in late 2021.
It has to be said that compared with Snowflake, a stock market worth $100 billion, the six months old AtomData is tiny as an ant. However, in the competitive environment of China’s relatively closed market, stories of “ants” beating “elephants” are common.
Find the object
It all started with a conversation.
In 2012, Ye had an interview in the United States with M.R. StoneBrake, the founder of the architecture of modern mainstream database systems. At that time, the database industry was like electric cars and fuel cars. The pattern had not yet formed, and some advanced ideas seemed to be unrealisable fantasies. However, Ye was inspired by it, which laid the foundation for the later establishment of “AtomData”. Stone is the name of the old man, but also the most essential energy for human development, the real record of human cultural development.
Snowflake successfully launched its IPO on September 16, 2020. Its core concept is to build an ecosystem where customers, partners, data providers, and data consumers can break down data silos and extract value from rapidly growing data sets in a secure, governed, and compliant manner — the data cloud.
What excites Ye is how much his vision for a real-time data warehouse in the native cloud overlaps with Snowflake’s technology.
Inspired by successful cases, the ambition of Ye becomes clearer and clearer.
The next Snowflake?
For entrepreneurs, there are two paths to go: you can be a challenger, which requires determination, courage, and execution, or you can be a small, comfortable company that lives off the big guys.
Ye chose the former. Adhering to the concept of cloud neutrality, he led the team to plan and design AtomData, the only real-time data warehouse product in China with important features such as cloud native, high elasticity, financial high availability, end-to-end data security, compatible with MySQL syntax and ACID.
Just like Taobao in 2003 and DJI in 2012, Shianjian has the same opportunity in 2022. Relying on the vast local market, its intention to sign projects has reached nearly 500 million yuan.
For a long time, “China imitated quickly but did not innovate”. But like many Chinese Internet companies, AtomData is an exception.
The innovation of AtomData is most obvious at the product level. For example, StoneAtom Data can realize multi-dimensional analysis perspective and business exploration of hundreds of billions of Data at the millisecond level. Its extreme cost-performance ratio on demand can maximize the Data value of customers. StoneDB, its kernel open source real-time HTAP database product, solves the problem that MySQL database itself does not have real-time analysis ability through plug-in method, and provides users with one-stop OLTP, OLAP and HTAP solutions.
Many Chinese companies have found success by learning from the US and Europe. For example, Baidu to Google, Youku to YouTube. But now some Chinese companies are being studied instead. For example, Youtube launched Shorts in The Indian market, which is inspired by TikTok, which is the second American Internet enterprise imitating TikTok after Facebook (Meta).
It’s still too early to say whether AtomData will become the next Snowflake, but we can expect more companies to emerge in China’s distributed database industry in its wake. One thing’s for sure:this is where the next Snowflake will be born.
