How Tencent Cloud’s Spitfire and Distributed DB Innovations Won SIGMOD 2021

Today, the author celebrates academic achievements. At ACM SIGMOD 2021, two Tencent Cloud research papers were accepted, highlighting cutting‑edge work in databases.

First, Spitfire, the multi‑level buffer manager introduced in TDSQL‑C, uses a novel low‑cost hot‑data identification method to keep hot pages in DRAM and warm pages in non‑volatile memory (NVM), boosting performance and cost‑effectiveness.

SIGMOD reviewers praised its innovation, noting that the combination of NVM hardware and database architecture had not been fully explored before, and that the technique improves read performance by over 100% without significant cost increase.

The second paper, a collaboration with Renmin University of China, presents a high‑performance strong‑consistency engine for distributed databases, achieving “double consistency” (transactional and distributed) while greatly improving the efficiency of distributed‑transaction clusters.

These works demonstrate Tencent Cloud’s focus on hardware‑software co‑design, leveraging new storage, network, and compute technologies to deliver leading cloud‑native database services.

Both papers—“Spitfire: A Three‑Tier Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non‑Volatile Memory” and “Efficiently Supporting Adaptive Multi‑Level Serializability Models in Distributed Database Systems”—are available at the provided URLs.

Tencent Cloud’s database team has a strong record of publications at SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and IEEE TKDE, and collaborates with universities such as Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Renmin University, producing AI‑driven auto‑tuning systems and over 20 joint papers and 14 patents.

The T‑TDSQL system, a full‑time‑variant database supporting both OLTP and OLAP, offers lightweight temporal data management and serves as a foundation for HTAP solutions; its research was accepted at VLDB 2019.

These achievements underscore the importance of sustained investment in fundamental research and industry‑academia collaboration.

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