Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB Breaks TPC-C Benchmark World Record with Innovative 'Three-Layer Decoupling' Architecture

The cloud-native database showcases record-breaking performance and enhanced efficiency

Hangzhou, China, February 26, 2025 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has set a new world record with its cloud-native relational database PolarDB in the TPC-C benchmark. Developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), the TPC-C benchmark evaluates the performance of Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems.

Source: tpc.org

According to the TPC-C results, PolarDB achieved 2.055 billion transactions per minute (tpmC), 2.5 times higher than the previous record holder, while reducing the cost per transaction (price/tpmC) by almost 40% to CNY 0.8 (USD 0.11). Additionally, during an 8-hour stress test, PolarDB successfully processed 2.2 trillion data operations with 100% data accuracy, and maintained a tpmC fluctuation rate of just 0.16%, an order of magnitude lower than the TPC-C benchmark requirement of 2%.

PolarDB’s achievement of 2.055 billion tpmC in the TPC-C benchmark is 59 times the peak transaction volume recorded during the Tmall 11.11 Shopping Festival in 2020.

Dr Feifei Li, President of Database Products Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence

Dr Feifei Li, President of Database Products Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: “This remarkable achievement is a testament to our team’s relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence in database technology. PolarDB's performance in the TPC-C benchmark showcases its capability to handle the most demanding workloads while emphasizing our commitment to providing cost-effective and scalable solutions. With innovative architecture, managing cloud-native databases will be as simple as ‘building blocks’. We will continue to support our customers to effectively manage and utilize data to thrive in the digital era.”

The TPC-C benchmark is designed to assess a database's performance under extreme conditions. It challenges a database to maintain data accuracy under significant stress, guarantee data consistency during software and hardware failure, and ensure data availability, consistency, and integrity under stress conditions. TPC-C is recognized as one of the most authoritative OLTP benchmarks in the industry.

PolarDB’s record-breaking performance is driven by its innovative architecture. Its Limitless Architecture features a "three-layer decoupling" design, which enhances efficiency by enabling the independent scaling of computing, memory, and storage for optimal elasticity. This exceptional performance is further boosted through software-hardware integration and advanced database kernel optimization technologies, including transaction processing improvement, index structure refinements, and I/O path enhancements.

PolarDB is a cloud-native relational database that is designed for business-critical database applications that require fast performance, high concurrency, and automatic scaling. This solution has supported the digital journey of over 10,000 enterprise customers across various sectors worldwide, including TNG eWallet, the largest fintech platform in Malaysia; Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), a major player in Chinese TV program production based in Hong Kong; enish, Inc., a mobile game development company in Japan; and DOKU, one of Indonesia's leading payment technology companies.

Alibaba Cloud offers a broad range of self-developed, cloud-native database products, including the relational database PolarDB, data warehouse AnalyticDB, multimodal database Lindorm, and Data Management Service (DMS), among others. For the fifth year in a row, Alibaba Cloud has been named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS).

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world’s leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.