PolarDB
Content Lifecycle & Evolution State
Overview
PolarDB-X is a cloud native distributed SQL Database designed for high concurrency, massive storage and complex querying scenarios. It has a shared-nothing architecture in which computing is decoupled from storage. It supports horizontal scaling, distributed transactions and Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads, and is characterized by enterprise-class, cloud native, high availability, highly compatible with MySQL and its ecosystem.
Key Features
Horizontal Scalability: Designed with Shared-nothing architecture, supporting multiple Hash and Range data sharding algorithms and achieving transparent horizontal scaling through implicit primary key sharding and dynamic scheduling of data shard.
Distributed Transactions: Adopts MVCC + TSO approach and 2PC protocol to implement distributed transactions. Transactions meet ACID characteristics, support RC/RR isolation levels, and achieve high performance through optimizations such as one-stage commit, read-only transaction, and asynchronous commit.
HTAP: Supports analytical queries through native MPP capability, and achieves strong isolation of OLTP and OLAP traffic through CPU quota constraint, memory pooling, storage resource separation, etc.
Use Cases
PolarDB-X is ideal for solving database scalability bottlenecks in core transaction systems, handling high concurrency, massive storage, and complex querying scenarios, as originally created for Alibaba Tmall’s ‘Double Eleven’.
Getting Started
To get started with PolarDB-X, explore the documentation on the official website or repository, and use the K8S Operator for deployment.
Recent Updates
Recent updates include externalized column storage (phase 1) to offload large LONGTEXT/LONGBLOB columns, various AI embedding and text-processing functions (AI_EMBEDDING, AI_EXTRACT, AI_TEXT2SQL), and an NL2SQL agent with conversation and transaction support.