POLARIS: The Distributed SQL Engine in Azure Synapse

Summary: Polaris re-architects Azure Synapse SQL DW to converge warehousing and big data, with compute-state separation and a novel cell data abstraction. It enables fine-grained scheduling, partial restarts, and PB-scale, T-SQL–compatible execution, shown by a 1PB 22-TPC-H run (>100TB). (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12203
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 8.5725413e-05
Overall Rank: 2,545 | 82.30%
DOI: 10.14778/3415478.3415545

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 27 of 27 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,284	Amazon Redshift Re-invented	2022	SIGMOD	0.00012837822
3,407	End-to-end Optimization of Machine Learning Prediction Queries	2022	SIGMOD	7.1295646e-05
3,644	BtrBlocks: Efficient Columnar Compression for Data Lakes	2023	SIGMOD	6.8854928e-05
3,763	Flexible Rule-Based Decomposition and Metadata Independence in Modin: A Parallel Dataframe System	2022	VLDB	6.7801795e-05
3,844	The evolution of Amazon Redshift (extended abstract)	2021	VLDB	6.7076451e-05
4,870	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	5.8613885e-05
5,490	The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation	2023	VLDB	5.4778129e-05
5,621	CXL and the Return of Scale-Up Database Engines	2024	VLDB	5.4061827e-05
6,302	Diva: Making MVCC Systems HTAP-Friendly	2022	SIGMOD	5.1215989e-05
7,205	Unified Query Optimization in the Fabric Data Warehouse	2024	SIGMOD	4.8014977e-05
7,296	Multi-Tenant Cloud Data Services: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities	2022	SIGMOD	4.7723197e-05
7,628	Understanding the Performance Implications of the Design Principles in Storage-Disaggregated Databases	2024	SIGMOD	4.692459e-05
7,916	Terabyte-Scale Analytics in the Blink of an Eye	2026	VLDB	4.6173899e-05
8,361	Cackle: Analytical Workload Cost and Performance Stability With Elastic Pools	2023	SIGMOD	4.5368524e-05
8,519	Extending Polaris to Support Transactions	2024	SIGMOD	4.494088e-05
8,758	Hyperspace: The Indexing Subsystem of Azure Synapse	2021	VLDB	4.456315e-05
8,859	Pipemizer: An Optimizer for Analytics Data Pipelines	2022	VLDB	4.4344107e-05
9,125	On-Demand State Separation for Cloud Data Warehousing	2022	VLDB	4.3917246e-05
9,318	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink® 2.0	2025	VLDB	4.3556432e-05
9,638	TracEx: Understanding and Analyzing Database Traces	2024	CIDR	4.3109052e-05
9,848	Saving Money for Analytical Workloads in the Cloud	2024	VLDB	4.2721228e-05
9,973	End-to-End Declarative Data Analytics: Co-designing Engines, Interfaces, and Cloud Infrastructure	2026	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
10,202	Reducing Tail Latency in Storage-Disaggregated Database Systems	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,404	Dynamic Pruning for Recursive Joins	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,714	Towards Designing Future-Proof Data Processing Systems	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,852	CloudGlide: Deconstructing the Landscape of Cloud-Based Analytics	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,066	OLAP on Modern Chiplet-Based Processors	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
22	SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets	2008	VLDB	0.0008456613
66	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00061639801
109	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.00048186983
167	The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse	2016	SIGMOD	0.00039180521
426	Amazon Redshift and the Case for Simpler Data Warehouses	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023594359
476	Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop	2015	CIDR	0.00022226941
918	Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud	2019	SIGMOD	0.00015350181
2,241	Query Optimization in Microsoft SQL Server PDW	2012	SIGMOD	9.2191212e-05
2,459	Multi-dimensional Resource Scheduling for Parallel Queries	1996	SIGMOD	8.7676516e-05
3,038	Azure Data Lake Store: A Hyperscale Distributed File Service for Big Data Analytics	2017	SIGMOD	7.6717218e-05
3,124	Parallel Query Scheduling and Optimization with Time- and Space-Shared Resources	1997	VLDB	7.5201555e-05
3,792	Schema-Agnostic Indexing with Azure DocumentDB	2015	VLDB	6.7618051e-05

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