Top of the Great Era

The next day, Zhou Buqi went to the company.He hadn't settled down yet, and as soon as he showed his head, he was seen by someone, and then he rushed over violently.

This is often the case.

When he is not in the company, if someone wants to find him, they have to email him or use Weibo to communicate, and most of the time they can't find anyone.

Moreover, everyone knows that the big boss is very busy, and he is embarrassed to bother him with some "little things" when the big boss is on a business trip.

Generally, only core executives like Zhang Yiming, Guo Pengfei, and He Yang would get in touch with him directly.

It's different when you come to the company.

I can't wait to come to anyone at random, and I want to rush up and say a few words.

Many times when encountering an incident, the subordinates quarrel and quarrel for half a month without any result, which is a waste of manpower and financial resources. When reporting to the big boss, a clear response can often be given within a few minutes.

Do it if you do it, don't do it if you don't do it, simply and neatly.

This is the advantage of having an authority in the company to be dictatorial, and the administrative efficiency is very high.Of course, the premise is that this authoritative guy has a high enough level. If the business ability is too low and the strategic vision is too poor, it will become arbitrary and self-willed, and there will only be negative effects.

Boss Zhou is different. Although everyone knows that he does not understand technology, his vision is too good and his judgment of the direction is too correct. Many people hope that he can go further arbitrarily, so that the operation of the company will be more efficient and more efficient. smooth.

At this time, someone was calling him.

"Old Zhou! Old Zhou!"

Zhou Buqi turned his head and looked, he didn't know this person very well, he seemed to be a big figure in the technical committee, in his thirties, he was a high-ranking scientist in the company anyway.

It's normal, most people wouldn't call him "Old Zhou" carelessly.

Zhou Buqi felt ashamed and felt a little irresponsible. He couldn't even name such an important person in the company. He was too incompetent at work. He smiled and waved to him, "I'm here! What can I order? "

It was originally a very polite greeting, but this guy went straight to the line and said excitedly: "Yes! Yes! There is really a big problem. Come and help us analyze it."

"what?"

Zhou Buqi was stunned.

Then, he was grabbed by the arm by this man, trying to pull him away as if kidnapping him.

"Johnny, the boss has something else to do!"

With Sun Guanran at the side, he gave a warning in a displeased manner.

Zhou Buqi suddenly remembered.

By the way, this person's name is Johnny!

Very easy to remember.

Because his English name is "Johnny" and his Chinese name is "Ni Qiang". In fact, he is Ni Qiang.Undergraduate Tsinghua University, Master and Ph.D students are all studying at Stanford, and have worked in Sun for 3 years.He is a class younger than Wang Xiaochuan. During his undergraduate studies, like many Tsinghua computer students, he got the opportunity to work part-time at Sohu.

He is Ziweixing who returned to China and joined under the advice of Wang Xiaochuan and Zhang Chaoyang.

Now, he is the number three person in Ziweiyun's technical field, and he is mainly responsible for the direction of the cloud database.

Ni Qiang is very shrewd, he doesn't believe Assistant Sun's threat.

The big boss is often away from the company for ten days and half a month. It doesn't matter if he is away for so many days. How long is it?
"It's okay, just half an hour!"

Then, without any explanation, he pulled Zhou Buqi and walked in the direction of Ziweiyun Building.

Sun Wanran still wanted to say something, but Zhou Buqi waved his hand and said with a smile: "I'll go and see what's going on, maybe I can really help."

After chatting all the way, when they got to the Ziweiyun Building, they felt a little embarrassed when asked.

Dr. Zhou Feng is in a meeting and is temporarily busy.

Dr. Wang Jian has something to do at home, so he will be late to the company.

Fortunately, Ni Qiang was thick-skinned enough, and said with a smile: "It just so happens that I have a small meeting here, why don't you come over and listen in? It's a very simple technical discussion. You must understand it as soon as you listen to it. Give us some advice. "

Zhou Buqi has already scolded him 180 times in his heart, but his face is still full of spring breeze, "Okay, I will learn from you, and I have some accumulation."

During the meeting, when the young technical engineers saw the big boss appearing, they were all excited, just like the warm welcome they received when the company invited the starring team of the upcoming blockbuster "Snow Flower and Secret Fan" to visit in the summer. At that time, Jun Zhixian was greatly sought after by these technical men, and they rushed to take a group photo.

Zhou Buqi briefly said a few words of encouragement, and then got to the point. At first, he was full of confidence.

But when the meeting was actually held, he was completely numb.

What kind of meeting is this?
Can't understand it at all.

The discussion is about a very difficult "long tail delay" problem faced by cloud databases.

Generally, in a small-scale Bench test, all working sets are in memory, and sometimes this cannot be seen.

But after actually running, once the traffic is heavy and the memory buffer does not hit the access storage, the delay will immediately soar from tens of microseconds to tens of milliseconds.

Such a long-tail delay is multiplied and magnified by several applications, which is very fatal to the user experience. No one wants to wait for each operation to turn around for a few seconds.

Just like many government affairs websites and banking apps.

This is a huge technical problem.

Not to mention a layman like Zhou Buqi, even a top industry expert like Ni Qiang can only say "try it out", "do it and see the effect", and "implement it in groups".

At the end of the meeting, several engineers listed a series of technical problems, and Zhou Buqi could not understand each of them... Then, Zhou Buqi had a little aftertaste.

This is likely to be arranged by Ni Qiang, showing the difficulty of developing a cloud database in front of him. There are too many problems encountered before.

At the end of the meeting, Ni Qiang's secretary came to inform that Dr. Zhou Feng and Dr. Wang Jian were ready, and then everyone went upstairs together to discuss business.

Zhou Buqi asked: "The development of cloud database is very difficult?"

"Well, there are a lot of sticky questions."

"I heard it has been applied?"

"Yes, it's already on the cloud, but it hasn't been made public yet, it's just for our internal use."

Then, Ni Qiang simply explained the situation.

The Ziwei cloud database was launched in October last year. It is not stable enough to be sold as a product. It can only try some of its own products first, and then slowly polish, repair, and improve.

After it matures, it will be officially disclosed to the public and become a product that can be realized.

Zhou Buqi asked: "Didn't Lao Yang lead a team to develop a database before, the Feitian database, how good is it? He even won a national award."

Ni Qiang shook his head, "This is different. The cloud database must be hosted on the cloud, and the direction is not uniform."

Zhou Buqi was puzzled, "Isn't the Feitian database already on the cloud?"

"It's up, but the problem is even bigger." Ni Qiang replaced Yang Zhenkun as the chief scientist in Ziweixing's database field, so he has the right to speak, "This is self-developed by Lao Yang's team, and there will be a lot of problems in terms of expansion." Big problem."

Zhou Buqi was confused when he heard it, "Isn't that a distributed database? Doesn't it mean that it is very scalable? I remember that's what Lao Yang told me back then. I was fooled by him?"

Ni Qiang laughed, "No, that's all true. However, Feitian database is indeed distributed data, which has many advantages such as high expansion, high performance, high availability, and low cost. But there is an unavoidable shortcoming, that is, the industry This is a big trend that all similar self-developed products can't get around."

"What do you mean?"

"Talents, business can be expanded, but talents cannot be expanded. Different databases have different theoretical frameworks and grammatical logic. It is easy to swallow them all, but if you want to study any database to the bottom, you need to focus on it for a long time. Just like me, I have been focusing on Sun's open source MySQL field for more than ten years, so I can barely be regarded as an expert in this field."

Zhou Buqi laughed, "Then you are being modest. You have led this business at Sun before."

Ni Qiang sighed, and said: "The application of the database is relatively simple, and undergraduates can learn it, but the bottom layer of the database is a high-tech industry, and talents are most needed. In universities all over the world, including the field of databases, there are mainly two One is the Oracle database, and the other is Sun’s MySQL. If you study Oracle in depth, you can only choose Oracle in the future. But if your research direction is MySQL, then your career choice will be big. MySQL is the most popular in the world. Open source database. Not only Microsoft’s database adopts the MySQL framework, but Amazon, Google, Facebook and other giants also use the MySQL underlying framework to develop their own databases after abandoning the expensive Oracle database.”

Zhou Buqi's face was heavy.

Yes, even technology giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft use Sun's open source framework when developing their own databases instead of independent research and development. There must be a big cognitive problem here.

Before Ni Qiang joined Ziweixing, the person in charge of Ziweixing's database business was Dr. Yang Zhenkun, who successfully led the team to develop the domestically developed Feitian database.

This is where there is a difference. Silicon Valley giants with unparalleled technical strength, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, have chosen open source solutions for database research... while Ziweixing, whose technical strength and vision were far inferior to them back then, did not I chose the self-study program.

Who is wrong?

It's fine if Zhou doesn't understand it, the key point is that he is also a technical layman.

Ni Qiang doesn't seem to want to belittle Dr. Yang Zhenkun, but Zhou Buqi has already tasted something, and feels like he has really been fooled.

The same is true of reality.

After the Feitian database developed by Yang Zhenkun went online, it also caused a sensation in the industry. It was tried on a small scale internally and the effect was very good.

He also won a national science and technology award, claiming to have broken the technical blockade imposed by the western powers on the database field of our country.

But in the past few years, it has obviously lost momentum.

Not only that, Ziweixing's technical committee also recruited Ni Qiang from Silicon Valley to replace Yang Zhenkun and became the chief scientist in Ziweixing's database field.

This is even more telling.