DANA is at the forefront of Indonesia’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, revolutionizing the way people transact financially. Founded in 2018, DANA has quickly become one of Indonesia’s leading e-wallets and payment services, boasting a staggering user base that is set to reach 200 million by 2024.
With a vision to create a cashless society in Southeast Asia’s largest economy and empower millions with innovative financial services, DANA has embarked on a journey of growth and transformation as Indonesia’s ubiquitous digital payment service.
However, as the company’s user base grew rapidly and transaction volumes soared, it became clear that a robust, scalable technology foundation was essential to sustain this rapid growth.
This is an incredible growth story for DANA and the pivotal role our partnership has played. Ocean BaseThe distributed relational database developed by Ant Group overcame technical challenges and achieved unparalleled success in Indonesia’s domestic market.
The Rise of DANA
Norman Sasono
According to DANA’s management, the journey began with a vision to create a cashless society in Indonesia by providing safe, reliable and innovative financial services to the masses. DANA Highlighting the company’s goals, the Chief Technology Officer said:
“As digitalization advances in Indonesia, the largest potential market in Southeast Asia, we want to create a cashless society along with a financial lifestyle.”
Norman highlighted that the e-wallet is about 60 million users short of covering the entire mobile user population in Indonesia, demonstrating the widespread demand for its scalable digital financial services.
In 2024, it will cover a wide range of services, including remittance, credit card binding, balance replenishment, and the first digital wallet to enable QR payments through integration with Indonesia’s national Quick Response Code Standard (QRIS) network.
As the company gained momentum, it saw a surge in user adoption and transaction volumes for its payment and embedded financial options. Zikri Zakiyulfadi, vice president of technical operations and engineering at DANA, said DANA’s user base grew 1.2 billion users. Approximately 150 million in the second half of 2023 By 2024, this number will reach approximately 180 million, making up a significant portion of Indonesia’s population of 275 million.
Tackling the challenges of scaling a popular platform
With such a wide range of services, DANA records billions of transactions each year. DANA has established itself as the leading e-wallet company in the country. Norman noted that DANA’s strong presence in Indonesia is due to not only its diverse capabilities but also the technological infrastructure to support them.
but, In early 2018, With online transactions and merchant partnerships expanding rapidly, DANA soon faced the hurdle of technology scalability and sustainability. At the time, its database management systems for various functions such as transaction management, payment processing, billing, membership, and marketing could not cope effectively. Zikry revealed that the initial setup, which used databases like MySQL, struggled to handle the increased transaction volume during peak periods.
As DANA’s user base grew exponentially, system capacity was repeatedly pushed to its limits, leading DANA to seek a more robust solution. Maintaining system stability, reliable performance, and operational efficiency amid volatile and unpredictable workloads became a challenging task.
Additionally, DANA faced high risks of data loss and extended downtime, as well as the complexities of migrating from an on-premise to a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
OceanBase: Leveraging data management technology to make a difference
To overcome these challenges, DANA turned to OceanBase, a cutting-edge distributed database solution launched by Ant Group in 2010 to accommodate its rapid growth. AlipayThe number of users and transaction volume on Yahoo! Shopping reached millions of transactions per second during China’s annual “Double 11 Shopping Festival.”
Charlie Yeung
Charlie Yang, Chief Technology Officer at OceanBase, explained that creating an in-house solution gave them the flexibility to customize and optimize the database to their specific requirements, and by leveraging the technology and expertise that has made Alipay the most successful e-wallet in the world, it has created demand for scalable database solutions across the industry, and now serves over 1,000 brands around the world, including DANA.
“In financial services, reliability and high availability were paramount to avoid downtime or data loss. Performance was also a key focus, aiming for low latency and high throughput to provide a seamless user experience.”
He said.
Already reaching capacity limits on its previous MySQL database and anticipating increased traffic volumes in the future, DANA upgraded to an on-premise solution from OceanBase in 2018 and then migrated to a hybrid cloud setup.
Since then, DANA’s user base has exploded from 20 million to nearly 200 million, a testament to the scalability OceanBase provides as data performance demands increase.
“In addition, OceanBase allows you to start small and scale up easily, Thousands of transactions per second It will seamlessly support DANA’s business growth.”
Charlie added that this scalability, combined with OceanBase’s disaster recovery and 24/7 global remote technical support, enables DANA to maintain high performance and reliability even as transaction volumes surge.
Exceeding global benchmarks for transaction processing
OceanBase’s distributed architecture has allowed DANA to seamlessly scale even during peak performance times.
“The setup is a distributed database and it’s not like the active/passive setup of a traditional bank or corporation. But with OceanBase it’s active/active.”
So instead of a main server handling the entire workload and a backup server becoming active only in the event of a failure, an active/active high availability cluster distributes the workload evenly across all nodes, ensuring optimal load balancing.
This database design ensured the technology was resilient, helping DANA achieve a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than eight seconds. Capable of processing thousands of transactions per secondThis is a high industry benchmark for a market like Indonesia, one that OceanBase has developed over 11 years of supporting the Double Eleven Shopping Festival, handling peak transaction rates of 61 million queries per second.
The database experts hold over 25,000 industry certifications and are recognized by top analysts such as Forrester and Gartner. OceanBase also holds the world record for the TPC-C transaction processing benchmark, demonstrating its unmatched ability to support mission-critical workloads for other organizations facing similar scalability obstacles.
By leveraging OceanBase’s distributed database capabilities, DANA is able to maintain high availability, minimize downtime, and provide uninterrupted service to its rapidly growing user base.
Zero downtime, zero data loss
Zikri Zakiyulfadi
One of the most significant benefits achieved by adopting OceanBase is achieving three important zeros: zero downtime, zero data loss, and zero data inconsistency. “We were able to achieve this by using OceanBase to deliver a single, unified, and cost-effective solution,” said Zikry, vice president of technical operations and engineering at DANA.
“There is no data loss because all nodes have the same data. Synchronization takes less than a millisecond, so it’s extremely fast.”
This level of stability and data integrity was essential to building trust between users and merchants. Norman added that with DANA’s online transactions and partnerships with merchants growing exponentially each year, a scalable and sustainable database solution was essential to ensure smooth growth and meet the increasing demands of its customers.
OceanBase’s high availability capabilities provide consistent response times regardless of workload fluctuations, enabling us to seamlessly achieve our ambitious growth and performance goals.
Seamless migration to a hybrid cloud setup
OceanBase proved to be a key technology enabler when DANA began its journey from an on-premise to a hybrid cloud architecture in 2019. DANA CTO Norman acknowledged that the knowledge and expertise gained from incorporating OceanBase’s distributed database capabilities was essential to his company’s learning curve around hybrid cloud, saying:
“It was through our partnership with OceanBase that we were able to make the decision to implement a modern, integrated database to ensure technology resilience and business growth.”
Norman noted that past experience has shown that 100% on-premise or 100% public cloud is not optimal for DANA’s capabilities: for normal workloads it is more economical to run on-site, but when traffic spikes occur, the workloads need to be moved to the cloud.
OceanBase ensured a seamless transition by moving to a hybrid cloud setup in 2019, enabling “elastic scalability” that gave DANA the flexibility to move instances to the public cloud, especially if there was a need to support high availability of the system for users.
OceanBase’s three-replica architecture also provides the ability to provide redundancy if one of the three data replica centers becomes overloaded, with two backups available. This setup helped DANA experience zero database failures and zero data loss in the following year of 2020, with the availability of the entire business system exceeding 99.99%.
OceanBase Migration Service (OMS) has migrated hundreds of instances from MySQL databases to OceanBase on the public cloud.
A partnership with a commitment to customer care
Zikri acknowledged how OceanBase’s technical capabilities supported DANA’s seamless implementation and migration process, and also praised the partnership for OceanBase’s unparalleled, around-the-clock, white-glove technical support.
“They always send an engineer to a strategy meeting and try to resolve the issue as quickly as possible in consultation with us. That kind of dedication is very rare.”
He commented.
Norman agreed with the importance of the relationship with OceanBase, saying that of all DANA’s vendors, the database is a core component of the rapidly expanding platform.
“Their support has helped us reach this level (nearly 200 million users) in less than six years.”
Scalable success through collaboration
DANA’s success story is a testament to the power of innovation, partnerships and technology to drive digital transformation. By working with OceanBase, DANA overcame scalability and performance challenges to propel itself to the forefront of Indonesia’s e-wallet and payments market.
The distributed architecture, high availability, and seamless scalability that OceanBase provides played a key role in helping DANA accommodate the exponential growth in users and transactions.
As DANA continues to shape the future of digital payments in Indonesia, our partnership with OceanBase serves as a shining example of how strategic collaboration can unlock new horizons of success in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
