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: 0.00010425349
Overall Rank: 1,512 | 89.84%
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	0.00011810023
1,343	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD	0.00010959797
1,456	Manu: A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System	2022	VLDB	0.00010588868
1,849	Diagnosing Root Causes of Intermittent Slow Queries in Cloud Databases	2020	VLDB	9.5032324e-05
2,037	LLM-R^2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency	2025	VLDB	9.1494269e-05
2,393	A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search	2022	VLDB	8.5298464e-05
2,745	Towards Cost-Effective and Elastic Cloud Database Deployment via Memory Disaggregation	2021	VLDB	8.0639912e-05
3,680	openGauss: An Autonomous Database System	2021	VLDB	7.1016555e-05
4,036	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	6.8360867e-05
5,019	2R: Efficiently Isolating Cold Pages in Flash Storages	2020	VLDB	6.3104018e-05
5,186	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	6.2357787e-05
6,019	Ganos: A Multidimensional, Dynamic, and Scene-Oriented Cloud-Native Spatial Database Engine	2022	VLDB	5.9101772e-05
6,274	Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures	2023	CIDR	5.8256214e-05
6,498	Operon: An Encrypted Database for Ownership-Preserving Data Management	2022	VLDB	5.7630754e-05
6,887	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB	5.6542418e-05
7,223	Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP	2024	VLDB	5.5801574e-05
7,243	SaS: SSD as SQL Database System	2021	VLDB	5.5751486e-05
7,348	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB	5.5435627e-05
7,949	Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.418704e-05
8,075	Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets	2023	CIDR	5.3921263e-05
8,812	SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware	2025	SIGMOD	5.270772e-05
8,892	Your Read is Our Priority in Flash Storage	2022	VLDB	5.2538364e-05
9,046	Bringing Cloud-Native Storage to SAP IQ	2021	SIGMOD	5.2307145e-05
9,439	FlashAlloc: Dedicating Flash Blocks By Objects	2023	VLDB	5.1760709e-05
9,460	CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization	2025	SIGMOD	5.1725159e-05
9,656	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink 2.0	2025	VLDB	5.142891e-05
9,717	Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases	2025	VLDB	5.1346445e-05
9,719	OceanBase Paetica: A Hybrid Shared-nothing/Shared-everything Database for Supporting Single Machine and Distributed Cluster	2023	VLDB	5.1345617e-05
9,956	CloudJump II: Optimizing Cloud Databases for Shared Storage	2025	SIGMOD	5.1014161e-05
10,138	Cquirrel: Continuous Query Processing over Acyclic Relational Schemas	2021	VLDB	5.0727027e-05
10,228	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.054828e-05
10,265	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB	5.0480912e-05
10,278	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0461162e-05
10,843	BtrLog: Low-Latency Logging for Cloud Database Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
10,956	Salesforce Database: A Cloud-Native Multi-Tenant OLTP Database	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,072	Terark-DS: A High-Performance and Storage-Efficient Key-Value Separation Storage Engine on Disaggregated Storage	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,184	AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,616	Towards Millions of Database Transmission Services in the Cloud	2024	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,624	Native Distributed Databases: Problems, Challenges and Opportunities	2024	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,825	Runtime Encoding Execution in AnalyticDB: Efficient Query Executor for Cloud Database	2022	CIDR	4.9769913e-05
13,713	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	0.00049821554
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038521221
78	Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning	2017	SIGMOD	0.00036675568
178	The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later	2012	VLDB	0.00026620521
224	Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2017	CIDR	0.00024011047
258	bLSM: A General Purpose Log Structured Merge Tree	2012	SIGMOD	0.00022932099
327	Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop	2015	CIDR	0.00020942751
461	Query-based Workload Forecasting for Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2018	SIGMOD	0.00017841988
1,068	Automated Demand-driven Resource Scaling in Relational Database-as-a-Service	2016	SIGMOD	0.00012186505
1,160	P-Store: An Elastic Database System with Predictive Provisioning	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011763834
1,218	PolarFS: An Ultra-low Latency and Failure Resilient Distributed File System for Shared Storage Cloud Database	2018	VLDB	0.00011484231
1,238	Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011397949
1,313	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011055196
1,760	PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat	2017	VLDB	9.7069418e-05
2,483	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB	8.3973995e-05
3,032	iBTune: Individualized Buffer Tuning for Large-scale Cloud Databases	2019	VLDB	7.7317595e-05
4,172	Pinot: Realtime OLAP for 530 Million Users	2018	SIGMOD	6.7567851e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,313	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD
2	6,887	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB
3	7,348	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB
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9	10,265	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB
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