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: ha2c3c627592b4385
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2019
Pagerank: 0.00010415166
Overall Rank: 1,509 | 89.89%
DOI: 10.14778/3352063.3352141
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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 41 of 41 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,147	MyRocks: LSM-Tree Database Storage Engine Serving Facebook's Social Graph	2020	VLDB	0.00011777851
1,280	Manu: A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System	2022	VLDB	0.00011199537
1,315	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD	0.00011047549
1,771	Diagnosing Root Causes of Intermittent Slow Queries in Cloud Databases	2020	VLDB	9.6775181e-05
1,956	LLM-R^2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency	2025	VLDB	9.2927535e-05
2,389	A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search	2022	VLDB	8.5228689e-05
2,654	Towards Cost-Effective and Elastic Cloud Database Deployment via Memory Disaggregation	2021	VLDB	8.1466759e-05
3,687	openGauss: An Autonomous Database System	2021	VLDB	7.0797286e-05
4,058	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	6.8134824e-05
5,042	2R: Efficiently Isolating Cold Pages in Flash Storages	2020	VLDB	6.2897371e-05
5,208	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	6.215627e-05
6,033	Ganos: A Multidimensional, Dynamic, and Scene-Oriented Cloud-Native Spatial Database Engine	2022	VLDB	5.8906344e-05
6,288	Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures	2023	CIDR	5.8063583e-05
6,512	Operon: An Encrypted Database for Ownership-Preserving Data Management	2022	VLDB	5.7440191e-05
6,903	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB	5.6363403e-05
6,994	Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP	2024	VLDB	5.6094434e-05
7,253	SaS: SSD as SQL Database System	2021	VLDB	5.5582274e-05
7,368	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB	5.526328e-05
7,965	Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.4007864e-05
8,091	Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets	2023	CIDR	5.3744333e-05
8,829	SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware	2025	SIGMOD	5.2533436e-05
8,912	Your Read is Our Priority in Flash Storage	2022	VLDB	5.236464e-05
9,067	Bringing Cloud-Native Storage to SAP IQ	2021	SIGMOD	5.2134185e-05
9,467	FlashAlloc: Dedicating Flash Blocks By Objects	2023	VLDB	5.1589556e-05
9,490	CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization	2025	SIGMOD	5.1554124e-05
9,683	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink 2.0	2025	VLDB	5.1258854e-05
9,745	OceanBase Paetica: A Hybrid Shared-nothing/Shared-everything Database for Supporting Single Machine and Distributed Cluster	2023	VLDB	5.1180512e-05
9,748	Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases	2025	VLDB	5.1176662e-05
9,989	CloudJump II: Optimizing Cloud Databases for Shared Storage	2025	SIGMOD	5.0845476e-05
10,175	Cquirrel: Continuous Query Processing over Acyclic Relational Schemas	2021	VLDB	5.0559291e-05
10,259	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.0381136e-05
10,293	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB	5.031399e-05
10,305	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0294306e-05
10,904	BtrLog: Low-Latency Logging for Cloud Database Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,017	Salesforce Database: A Cloud-Native Multi-Tenant OLTP Database	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,133	Terark-DS: A High-Performance and Storage-Efficient Key-Value Separation Storage Engine on Disaggregated Storage	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,243	AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
11,663	Towards Millions of Database Transmission Services in the Cloud	2024	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,671	Native Distributed Databases: Problems, Challenges and Opportunities	2024	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,869	Runtime Encoding Execution in AnalyticDB: Efficient Query Executor for Cloud Database	2022	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
13,753	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
31	Hive - A Warehousing Solution Over a Map-Reduce Framework	2009	VLDB	0.00049707539
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038609177
74	Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning	2017	SIGMOD	0.00037164008
177	The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later	2012	VLDB	0.00026571747
224	Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2017	CIDR	0.00023973185
261	bLSM: A General Purpose Log Structured Merge Tree	2012	SIGMOD	0.00022862412
327	Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop	2015	CIDR	0.00020904249
458	Query-based Workload Forecasting for Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2018	SIGMOD	0.00017870238
1,058	Automated Demand-driven Resource Scaling in Relational Database-as-a-Service	2016	SIGMOD	0.00012225863
1,157	P-Store: An Elastic Database System with Predictive Provisioning	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011748784
1,221	PolarFS: An Ultra-low Latency and Failure Resilient Distributed File System for Shared Storage Cloud Database	2018	VLDB	0.00011449953
1,240	Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011373933
1,324	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011019001
1,772	PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat	2017	VLDB	9.6760688e-05
2,474	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB	8.3955114e-05
2,929	iBTune: Individualized Buffer Tuning for Large-scale Cloud Databases	2019	VLDB	7.830745e-05
4,187	Pinot: Realtime OLAP for 530 Million Users	2018	SIGMOD	6.7378942e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,324	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD
2	6,903	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB
3	7,368	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB
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9	10,293	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB
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