Cloud-Native Database Systems at Alibaba: Opportunities and Challenges

Summary: Alibaba's cloud-native DBs use hardware-software co-design (RDMA, NVM, DPDK), shared storage, and decoupled compute for elasticity. POLARDB/POLARDB-X delivers OLTP; AnalyticDB enables real-time analytics; autoscaling yields scale and lessons learned. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12133
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2019
Pagerank: 0.00010362456
Overall Rank: 1,559 | 89.31%
DOI: 10.14778/3352063.3352141

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Feifei Li (Alibaba)

BibTeX Citation

@article{li_vldb19,
        title = {{Cloud-Native Database Systems at Alibaba: Opportunities and Challenges}},
        author = {Li, Feifei},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '19},
        volume = {12},
        number = {12},
        pages = {2263--2272},
        doi = {10.14778/3352063.3352141},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3352063.3352141},
        year = {2019}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 39 of 39 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,213	MyRocks: LSM-Tree Database Storage Engine Serving Facebook's Social Graph	2020	VLDB	0.00011646797
1,584	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD	0.0001028934
1,589	Manu: A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System	2022	VLDB	0.00010264469
1,949	Diagnosing Root Causes of Intermittent Slow Queries in Cloud Databases	2020	VLDB	9.430385e-05
2,452	A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search	2022	VLDB	8.5584e-05
2,553	LLM-R^2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency	2025	VLDB	8.4283807e-05
2,834	Towards Cost-Effective and Elastic Cloud Database Deployment via Memory Disaggregation	2021	VLDB	8.073077e-05
3,662	openGauss: An Autonomous Database System	2021	VLDB	7.2166682e-05
4,103	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	6.8993506e-05
4,895	2R: Efficiently Isolating Cold Pages in Flash Storages	2020	VLDB	6.4558543e-05
5,894	Ganos: A Multidimensional, Dynamic, and Scene-Oriented Cloud-Native Spatial Database Engine	2022	VLDB	6.0486927e-05
6,174	Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures	2023	CIDR	5.9510389e-05
6,386	Operon: An Encrypted Database for Ownership-Preserving Data Management	2022	VLDB	5.8899805e-05
6,770	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	5.7783709e-05
7,072	Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP	2024	VLDB	5.7107965e-05
7,135	SaS: SSD as SQL Database System	2021	VLDB	5.6940523e-05
7,971	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB	5.5160445e-05
8,016	Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets	2023	CIDR	5.5070057e-05
8,723	Your Read is Our Priority in Flash Storage	2022	VLDB	5.3769695e-05
8,947	Bringing Cloud-Native Storage to SAP IQ	2021	SIGMOD	5.3475158e-05
8,978	Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.3406001e-05
9,116	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB	5.3205884e-05
9,256	FlashAlloc: Dedicating Flash Blocks By Objects	2023	VLDB	5.2973814e-05
9,468	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink 2.0	2025	VLDB	5.2634238e-05
9,530	OceanBase Paetica: A Hybrid Shared-nothing/Shared-everything Database for Supporting Single Machine and Distributed Cluster	2023	VLDB	5.2543048e-05
9,544	SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware	2025	SIGMOD	5.2528121e-05
9,951	Cquirrel: Continuous Query Processing over Acyclic Relational Schemas	2021	VLDB	5.1915905e-05
10,039	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.1723558e-05
10,616	Terark-DS: A High-Performance and Storage-Efficient Key-Value Separation Storage Engine on Disaggregated Storage	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,688	CloudJump II: Optimizing Cloud Databases for Shared Storage	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,689	CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,749	AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,920	Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,993	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,011	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,287	Towards Millions of Database Transmission Services in the Cloud	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,298	Native Distributed Databases: Problems, Challenges and Opportunities	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,510	Runtime Encoding Execution in AnalyticDB: Efficient Query Executor for Cloud Database	2022	CIDR	5.093636e-05
13,394	Ganos Aero: A Cloud-Native System for Big Raster Data Management and Processing	2023	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
32	Hive - A Warehousing Solution Over a Map-Reduce Framework	2009	VLDB	0.00050111008
73	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00037333356
86	Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning	2017	SIGMOD	0.00035316107
186	The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later	2012	VLDB	0.00026182534
234	Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2017	CIDR	0.00023810722
275	bLSM: A General Purpose Log Structured Merge Tree	2012	SIGMOD	0.00022630189
330	Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop	2015	CIDR	0.0002104801
461	Query-based Workload Forecasting for Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2018	SIGMOD	0.00018068441
1,092	Automated Demand-driven Resource Scaling in Relational Database-as-a-Service	2016	SIGMOD	0.00012221946
1,218	P-Store: An Elastic Database System with Predictive Provisioning	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011621066
1,242	Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011516162
1,283	PolarFS: An Ultra-low Latency and Failure Resilient Distributed File System for Shared Storage Cloud Database	2018	VLDB	0.00011337934
1,347	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011073571
1,749	PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat	2017	VLDB	9.8395185e-05
2,563	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB	8.412445e-05
3,219	iBTune: Individualized Buffer Tuning for Large-scale Cloud Databases	2019	VLDB	7.6283153e-05
4,231	Pinot: Realtime OLAP for 530 Million Users	2018	SIGMOD	6.8177976e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,347	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD
2	7,971	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB
3	9,116	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB
4	7,901	Cloud Databases: New Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities	2022	VLDB
5	6,770	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD
6	1,584	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD
7	2,563	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB
8	11,016	AnalyticDB-PG: A Cloud-native High-performance Data Warehouse in Alibaba Cloud	2025	VLDB
9	11,011	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB
10	5,477	PolarDB-IMCI: A Cloud-Native HTAP Database System at Alibaba	2023	SIGMOD