Top of the big era

The next day, Zhou Buqi went to the company. Before he even settled down, as soon as he showed his head, someone saw him, and then he rushed over in a fierce rush.

That's often the case.

When he is not in the company, if someone wants to find him, they have to send him an email or use WeChat to communicate. Most of the time, no one can be found.

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

Generally, only core executives such as Zhang Yiming, Guo Pengfei, and He Yang would contact him directly.

It's different when you come to the company.

I can't wait to rush up to say a few words to anyone who comes by.

Many times when something happens, the people below are arguing and arguing, but no results can be achieved for half a month, which is a waste of human and financial resources. If the report is reported to the big boss, a clear response can often be given within a few minutes.

If you do it, do it, if you don’t do it, don’t do it, simply and neatly.

This is the benefit of having an authoritative authority in the company, 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, he will become arbitrary and willful, which will only have negative effects.

Boss Zhou is different. Although everyone knows that he does not understand technology, his vision is so good and his judgment of direction is so correct. Many people hope that he can be more arbitrary, so that the company's operations will be more efficient and better. Smooth.

At this time, someone called him.

"Old Zhou! Old Zhou!"

Zhou Buqi turned around and saw that this person was not very familiar to him. He seemed to be a big shot in the technical committee. He looked to be in his thirties. Anyway, he was a very high-level scientist in the company.

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

Zhou Buqi felt ashamed and felt that he was a little irresponsible. He couldn't even name such an important person in the company. He was so incompetent at his job. He smiled and waved to him, "I'm here! What are your orders?" "

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

"ah?"

Zhou Buqi was stunned.

Then, this person grabbed his arm and tried to pull him away as if he was being kidnapped.

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

Sun Wanran was nearby and warned him unhappily.

Zhou Buqi suddenly remembered.

By the way, this guy’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, a very influential technical boss in the company who returned from studying in the United States. I studied at Tsinghua University for my undergraduate degree, and studied for my master's and doctorate degrees at Stanford. I worked at Sun for 3 years. He is a student one year younger than Wang Xiaochuan. During his undergraduate period, like many Tsinghua computer students, he got the opportunity to work part-time at Sohu.

He is Ziweixing who returned to China to join at the suggestion of Wang Xiaochuan and Zhang Chaoyang.

Now, he is the third person in the technical field of Ziwei Cloud, and he is mainly responsible for the direction of cloud database.

Ni Qiang is very smart, he doesn't believe Assistant Sun's intimidation.

The big boss is often away from the company for ten days and a half. It doesn't matter if he is away from work for so many days. How long is it still?

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

After fussing all the way, when they arrived at 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 and will have to be late to arrive at the company.

Fortunately, Ni Qiang was thick-skinned and said with a smile: "Just in time, I have a small meeting here, why don't you come over and listen in? It's a very simple technical discussion. I'm sure you will understand it and give us some advice. "

Zhou Buqi had already scolded him a hundred and eighty times in his heart, but his face still felt like spring breeze, "Okay, let's learn from you guys and gain some experience."

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 "Snowflakes and the Secret Fan" to visit in the summer. At that time, Jun Ji-hyun was greatly sought after by these technical men, who rushed to take photos with her.

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

But when it came to the actual meeting, I felt completely numb.

What kind of meeting is this?

I don't understand it at all.

What is discussed is a very difficult "long tail delay" problem faced by cloud databases.

Generally in small-scale Bench tests, all working sets are in memory, and sometimes this is not visible.

But after the actual operation, once the traffic is large 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 amplified by several applications, which is very fatal to the user experience. No one is willing to wait for several seconds for each operation.

Just like many government websites and banking apps.

This is a huge technical issue.

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

At the end of the meeting, several engineers listed a series of technical problems, each of which Zhou Buqi couldn't understand... Then Zhou Buqi came back to his senses.

This was probably arranged by Ni Qiang to show the difficulty of developing a cloud database in front of him. There were too many problems encountered in the past.

After the meeting, Ni Qiang's secretary came over to inform that Dr. Zhou Feng and Dr. Wang Jian were ready. Then everyone went upstairs to discuss business matters.

Zhou Buqi asked: "Is it very difficult to develop a cloud database?"

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

"I heard it has been applied?"

"Yes, it has been moved to the cloud, but it has not been made public yet. It is only for our internal use."

Then, Ni Qiang briefly explained the situation.

Ziweiyun database was launched in October last year. It is not stable enough and cannot be sold as a product. It can only be tried out with some of its own products, and then slowly polished, repaired and improved.

After it matures, it will be officially disclosed to the public and turned into a product that can be monetized.

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

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

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

"It's done, but the problem is bigger." Ni Qiang replaced Yang Zhenkun as the chief scientist in the field of Ziweixing database, so he has a lot of say, "This is self-developed under the leadership of Lao Yang, and there will be a lot of problems in terms of expansion. Big problem."

Zhou Buqi was confused when he heard this, "Isn't that a distributed database? Isn't it said to be very scalable? I remember that this is what Lao Yang told me back then. I was deceived by him?"

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

"What's the meaning?"

"Talent, business can be expanded, but talent cannot be expanded. Different databases have different theoretical frameworks and grammatical logic. It is easy to swallow them all, but if you want to delve into the bottom layer of any database, 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, and I can barely be considered an expert in this field."

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

Ni Qiang sighed and said: "The application of database is relatively simple and can be learned by undergraduates. However, the bottom layer of database is a high-tech industry, and what is most needed is talent. In universities around the world, including the field of database, there are mainly two Directions, one is Oracle database, and the other is Sun's MySQL. If you study Oracle in depth, your future career choice will only be Oracle. But if your research direction is MySQL, then your career choice will be huge. MySQL is the most popular database in the world. Open source database. Not only Microsoft’s database uses the MySQL framework, but giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook also use the underlying framework of MySQL to develop their own databases after abandoning their expensive Oracle databases.”

Zhou Buqi looked 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 a disagreement. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants with unparalleled technical strength have all chosen open source solutions for database research... However, Ziweixing, which was far inferior to them in terms of technical strength and vision, has Choose the self-study plan.

Who was wrong?

It would be fine if Zhou Buqi understood it. The key point is that he is also a technical layman.

Ni Qiang didn't seem to want to disparage Dr. Yang Zhenkun, but Zhou Buqi had already tasted some of it and felt that he had really been deceived.

This is also the case in reality.

The Feitian database developed by Yang Zhenkun also caused a stir in the industry after it went online. It was tried out on a small scale internally and the results were very good.

It also won the national science and technology award, claiming to have broken the technological blockade imposed by Western powers on my country's database field. At that time, Boss Zhou was particularly embarrassed.

But in recent years, it has obviously lost momentum.

Not only that, Ziweixing’s technical committee also hired Ni Qiang from Silicon Valley to replace Yang Zhenkun and become the chief scientist in the database field of Ziweixing.

This explains the problem even more.