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: 0.00010429438
Overall Rank: 1,513 | 89.83%
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 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	0.00011813751
1,343	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD	0.00010963588
1,462	Manu: A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System	2022	VLDB	0.0001058099
1,857	Diagnosing Root Causes of Intermittent Slow Queries in Cloud Databases	2020	VLDB	9.4929201e-05
2,039	LLM-R^2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency	2025	VLDB	9.1493268e-05
2,395	A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search	2022	VLDB	8.5281914e-05
2,744	Towards Cost-Effective and Elastic Cloud Database Deployment via Memory Disaggregation	2021	VLDB	8.0677088e-05
3,682	openGauss: An Autonomous Database System	2021	VLDB	7.1013922e-05
4,034	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	6.8393244e-05
5,016	2R: Efficiently Isolating Cold Pages in Flash Storages	2020	VLDB	6.3133844e-05
5,185	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	6.238732e-05
6,019	Ganos: A Multidimensional, Dynamic, and Scene-Oriented Cloud-Native Spatial Database Engine	2022	VLDB	5.9129763e-05
6,270	Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures	2023	CIDR	5.8283805e-05
6,496	Operon: An Encrypted Database for Ownership-Preserving Data Management	2022	VLDB	5.7658049e-05
6,882	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB	5.6569197e-05
7,221	Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP	2024	VLDB	5.5828002e-05
7,240	SaS: SSD as SQL Database System	2021	VLDB	5.577789e-05
7,345	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB	5.5461882e-05
7,945	Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.4212704e-05
8,129	Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets	2023	CIDR	5.3938156e-05
8,804	SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware	2025	SIGMOD	5.2732683e-05
8,883	Your Read is Our Priority in Flash Storage	2022	VLDB	5.2563247e-05
9,038	Bringing Cloud-Native Storage to SAP IQ	2021	SIGMOD	5.2331918e-05
9,430	FlashAlloc: Dedicating Flash Blocks By Objects	2023	VLDB	5.1785224e-05
9,451	CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization	2025	SIGMOD	5.1749657e-05
9,648	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink 2.0	2025	VLDB	5.1453267e-05
9,712	Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases	2025	VLDB	5.1370764e-05
9,714	OceanBase Paetica: A Hybrid Shared-nothing/Shared-everything Database for Supporting Single Machine and Distributed Cluster	2023	VLDB	5.1369935e-05
9,948	CloudJump II: Optimizing Cloud Databases for Shared Storage	2025	SIGMOD	5.1038322e-05
10,134	Cquirrel: Continuous Query Processing over Acyclic Relational Schemas	2021	VLDB	5.0751052e-05
10,222	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.0572221e-05
10,259	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB	5.050482e-05
10,272	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0485061e-05
10,833	BtrLog: Low-Latency Logging for Cloud Database Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,947	Salesforce Database: A Cloud-Native Multi-Tenant OLTP Database	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,063	Terark-DS: A High-Performance and Storage-Efficient Key-Value Separation Storage Engine on Disaggregated Storage	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,175	AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,610	Towards Millions of Database Transmission Services in the Cloud	2024	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,618	Native Distributed Databases: Problems, Challenges and Opportunities	2024	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,819	Runtime Encoding Execution in AnalyticDB: Efficient Query Executor for Cloud Database	2022	CIDR	4.9793485e-05
13,708	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	0.00049839909
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038531147
78	Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning	2017	SIGMOD	0.00036684414
179	The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later	2012	VLDB	0.00026611886
224	Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2017	CIDR	0.00024013745
258	bLSM: A General Purpose Log Structured Merge Tree	2012	SIGMOD	0.00022939599
327	Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop	2015	CIDR	0.0002095191
460	Query-based Workload Forecasting for Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2018	SIGMOD	0.00017842695
1,067	Automated Demand-driven Resource Scaling in Relational Database-as-a-Service	2016	SIGMOD	0.0001219157
1,160	P-Store: An Elastic Database System with Predictive Provisioning	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011769228
1,217	PolarFS: An Ultra-low Latency and Failure Resilient Distributed File System for Shared Storage Cloud Database	2018	VLDB	0.00011489607
1,236	Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011402848
1,313	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011060108
1,758	PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat	2017	VLDB	9.7113785e-05
2,484	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB	8.3993882e-05
3,032	iBTune: Individualized Buffer Tuning for Large-scale Cloud Databases	2019	VLDB	7.7351139e-05
4,172	Pinot: Realtime OLAP for 530 Million Users	2018	SIGMOD	6.7598973e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,313	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD
2	6,882	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB
3	7,345	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB
4	8,047	Cloud Databases: New Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities	2022	VLDB
5	5,185	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD
6	1,343	PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers	2021	SIGMOD
7	2,484	AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud	2019	VLDB
8	10,311	AnalyticDB-PG: A Cloud-native High-performance Data Warehouse in Alibaba Cloud	2025	VLDB
9	10,259	From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC	2025	VLDB
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