PolarDB-X
PolarDB-X is a cloud-native distributed database developed by Alibaba Cloud. It is compatible with the MySQL syntax and provides scale-out capabilities, financial-grade high availability, and hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) functionality. It distributes business workloads to multiple compute and storage nodes and is designed to address database challenges such as ultra-high concurrency, massive data storage, and large table performance bottlenecks.
PolarDB-X has been tried and tested in Tmall Double 11 shopping festivals, and has helped customers in industries such as finance, logistics, energy, e-commerce, and public service to address business challenges.
High-volume storage
Linearly increases storage space to provide petabyte-scale storage, making storage bottlenecks of standalone databases a thing of the past.
HTAP Functionality
Provides the massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities to significantly improve the efficiency of complex analysis and queries on vast amounts of data.
Scale-out
Provides extensive algorithms to distribute data across multiple storage nodes, effectively reducing the volume of data stored in a single table.
Specifications
PolarDB-X 2.0
Provides scale-out capabilities, financial-grade high availability, and HTAP functionality.
4 Cores, 16 GB Memory
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Distributes data across multiple storage nodes to reduce the volume of data stored in a single table.
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Provides HTAP functionality to greatly improve execution efficiency.
Distributes data across multiple storage nodes to reduce the volume of data stored in a single table.
PolarDB-X 2.0
Provides scale-out capabilities, financial-grade high availability, and HTAP functionality.
8 Cores, 32 GB Memory
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![]()
Distributes data across multiple storage nodes to reduce the volume of data stored in a single table.
-
![]()
Provides HTAP functionality to greatly improve execution efficiency.
Features
Different Architectures to Meet Various Deployment Requirements
PolarDB-X is available in the 1.0 and 2.0 versions.
PolarDB-X 1.0
PolarDB-X 1.0 consists of PolarDB-X instances at the computing layer and custom ApsaraDB RDS instances at the storage layer. PolarDB-X 2.0 shards databases and tables by attaching multiple ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instances. It provides a variety of sharding solutions tailored to online transaction processing (OLTP) scenarios to accommodate the requirements for high concurrency, high-volume storage, and large-scale computing.
PolarDB-X 2.0
PolarDB-X 2.0 supports strongly consistent distributed transactions based on multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) at a global scale, achieves huge performance improvements over private RPC protocols, and allows consistent reads on followers. These optimizations simplify O&M operations.
Cloud-native Architecture to Provide Enterprise-level Capabilities
PolarDB-X separates storage from computing and abstracts resources into resource pools. This allows you to manage resources by resource pool and make configuration changes within minutes.
Transparent Distribution
Provides elastic scaling to scale beyond the storage limits of standalone databases and implements automatic load balancing at the data layer without affecting applications. PolarDB-X implements distributed DDL queries based on the gh-ost design philosophy to improve sharding performance. PolarDB-X provides the global binlog feature to ensure smooth transition from standalone databases to distributed databases.
Financial-grade Reliability
Uses the Paxos protocol to implement a variety of disaster recovery capabilities with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 0. PolarDB-X also provides strongly consistent distributed transactions through read committed (RC) and repeatable read (RR) isolation levels to meet TPC-C specifications.
Robust Performance
Provides linear scalability with up to 140 million peak transactions per second (TPS), easily handling the peak traffic during the 2020 Double 11 shopping festival.
Hybrid Processing
Provides parallel computing and auto scaling capabilities to support real-time reporting and analysis of online data. PolarDB-X supports intelligent read/write splitting and analysis of read-only replicas. This helps isolate resources when you perform OLTP and online analytical processing (OLAP) queries. PolarDB-X provides high concurrency and unlimited storage scaling, and standardized SQL and ACID transactions for centralized storage of petabytes of data.
Ecosystem Compatibility
A self-developed database service that is compatible with the complete set of database ecosystem tools, MySQL binlog formats, and open-source tools for database and table sharding. PolarDB-X can be connected to primary and secondary ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instances and is seamlessly integrated with the big data ecosystem. You can perform web-based batch operations on multiple ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instances, such as DDL and scaling operations.
Advanced Measures to Ensure Database Security
PolarDB-X is deployed on the public cloud and uses a variety of methods to ensure production security.
Data Security
Supports virtual private clouds (VPCs), IP address whitelists, asymmetric encryption, and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to ensure data service security.
Service Stability
Allocates dedicated high-performance physical resources to each instance and provides complete isolation between instances to ensure the reliability of data services.
O&M Stability
Supports isolated deployment of the O&M system across multiple regions to ensure the stability of the O&M system.
Extensive O&M Features to Significantly Reduce O&M Costs
You can offload the majority of O&M workloads by using the features developed based on the rich experience of Alibaba Cloud experts.
Backup and Restoration
Supports periodic automatic backups and manual backups that take effect immediately. You can clone instances to restore deleted data to any point in time.
Version Upgrade
Automatically performs minor version updates online to fix known bugs without interference to your business.
Monitoring and Alerting
Monitors computing resources, storage resources, and databases, supports custom alerting policies, and provides a comprehensive overview of all instances.
SQL Audit and Analysis
Capable of quickly identifying problematic SQL queries based on the flexible and powerful query syntax, and provides real-time analysis of SQL queries and the out-of-the-box reporting center.
Scenarios
Support for Ultra-high Concurrency Queries
Public transport involves a large number of vehicles of different makes and models, and a variety of billing methods. The database system is required to store vast amounts of data and perform complex queries. The combination of PolarDB-X and AnalyticDB is ideal for building an intelligent urban public transport system, where PolarDB-X is used to store large amounts of data and AnalyticDB is used to analyze the data. This system can meet requirements of compute-intensive scenarios such as route planning, bus line query, bus arrival prediction, business report settlement, and bus scheduling, and therefore improve operational efficiency and service quality.
Features
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Elastic ScalingPolarDB-X uses a hierarchical architecture to ensure linear scalability in terms of concurrency, computing, and data storage. The configurations of PolarDB-X instances can be upgraded or downgraded in response to traffic fluctuations.
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Out-of-the-box Usage
PolarDB-X allows you to easily upgrade a standalone database to a distributed database while providing a wealth of O&M features. Compared with self-managed distributed databases, PolarDB-X instances can significantly reduce R&D costs.
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Ecosystem Compatibility
PolarDB-X is highly compatible with MySQL and seamlessly integrated with the big data ecosystem. It synchronizes data to AnalyticDB in real time to implement real-time analysis of large amounts of data and empower business intelligence.
Related Products and Services
Delivery of Strong Data Consistency and Financial-grade Reliability
This scenario requires strong data consistency and high availability, reliability, and security. PolarDB-X uses the Paxos protocol to implement a variety of disaster recovery capabilities with a RPO of 0. PolarDB-X also provides strongly consistent distributed transactions through RC and RR isolation levels to meet the requirements of TPC-C and bank transfer models for financial-grade reliability.
Features
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Strong Consistency
PolarDB-X supports strongly consistent distributed transactions and global secondary indexes to ensure transaction data consistency in distributed environments.
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Linear Scalability
PolarDB-X horizontally splits the original database to break the data storage limit of the database system and handle the high-volume concurrent traffic during peak hours.
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Smooth Scaling
PolarDB-X supports smooth hot scaling with minimal impact on applications, effectively providing a secure scaling strategy for business expansion in the future.
Related Products and Services
Adaptive to Excessively Large Tables and Traffic Fluctuations
In large-scale promotion scenarios across the e-commerce landscape, the system is challenged by the sudden spike in demand. PolarDB-X has been tried and tested in Tmall Double 11 shopping festivals, and the business of Alibaba Cloud customers in various industries. It can effectively improve the concurrent update performance of hot data and ensure stable business operation.
Features
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Business Isolation
PolarDB-X vertically splits out business centers so that different types of business data can be stored in different ApsaraDB RDS instances. This ensures that resources are isolated between users and makes the entire database architecture physically scalable.
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High Concurrency
PolarDB-X provides smooth scaling and flexible configuration change capabilities that can multiplicatively expand the computing and storage capacity of the business system in a short period of time. This allows you to easily respond to traffic bursts.
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Maturity and Stability
PolarDB-X is a tried and tested solution for handling high-volume concurrent traffic during Double 11.
