Charlie Yang, CTO of OceanBase, dives into his journey from Alibaba to leading a groundbreaking distributed database that supports over a billion monthly users. He discusses the challenges faced by e-commerce giants in database management and how OceanBase emerged as a scalable solution. The conversation highlights performance advantages of native distributed databases over traditional sharding, with insights into transaction-focused databases and their integration with AI applications. Yang emphasizes the vital role of community contributions in shaping effective database solutions.