Inside NDBC 2018: Cutting-Edge Database Innovations from Alibaba and Academia

From October 12‑14, 2018, the annual China Database Conference (NDBC 2018) was held in Dalian, organized by the China Computer Federation (CCF) and its Database Committee, featuring a strong Alibaba delegation led by Vice President of Alibaba Group, DAMO Academy scientist, and Database & Storage Technology leader Dr. Li Feifei (nickname: Feidao).

The industry database R&D forum, built on the NDBC platform, served as a two‑way technical salon that bridges academic research and emerging internet business needs, fostering system‑level breakthroughs and academic‑industrial collaboration.

Dr. Li emphasized that database systems are core infrastructure with a global market of $40 billion. Recent cloud computing and big‑data growth bring unprecedented opportunities, requiring adaptation to cloud‑native challenges, massive distributed deployments, new hardware, AI integration, and enhanced security such as encrypted databases and privacy protection.

The forum gathered senior technical leaders from Alibaba, Huawei, Neusoft, and East China Normal University, who shared business challenges, technical solutions, and future trends in database technology.

Cloud Native Database POLARDB: Self‑Developed High Performance

POLARDB, Alibaba Cloud’s self‑developed relational database, separates compute and storage, enabling rapid node scaling and up to 100 TB storage. It leverages user‑space network and storage stacks, RDMA, NVMe SSD, and Optane to achieve cloud‑scale performance. POLARDB uses the PolarFS distributed file system, published at VLDB 2018, to reduce I/O overhead and achieve several‑fold MySQL performance gains while maintaining 100 % MySQL compatibility.

POLARDB X (Powered By X‑DB): Global Scale, Extreme Performance

Designed for Alibaba’s massive online transaction processing, POLARDB X adopts a shared‑nothing architecture with transparent sharding, Paxos‑based consistency, and a decentralized HLC mechanism for distributed transactions, handling PB‑scale data and up to 100 million SQL requests per second during peak events.

SolarDB: Academic‑Industry Collaboration Result

SolarDB is a joint effort by East China Normal University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and Shanghai Bank, built on the open‑source OB 0.4 codebase and deployed in production at the bank. It follows a shared‑everything architecture with scalable storage and compute nodes, balancing extensibility and complexity.

Architecture differences – POLARDB (shared‑disk), POLARDB X (shared‑nothing), SolarDB (shared‑everything).

Application scenarios – POLARDB for cloud computing, POLARDB X for large‑scale internet services, SolarDB for financial business.

Technical focus – POLARDB emphasizes cloud‑native elasticity and new hardware; POLARDB X targets high performance and low cost at global scale; SolarDB balances scalability with system complexity.

Huawei Gauss Database: Memory and Distributed Analytics

Huawei’s Gauss Database, originally a memory‑database for telecom billing, now supports distributed processing, persistent storage, and MPP architecture with code generation and GPU acceleration, serving large‑scale data warehouses for banks and other enterprises.

AnalyticDB: Next‑Generation Real‑Time OLAP

AnalyticDB, Alibaba’s commercial‑grade real‑time analytics database, supports over 2,000 physical nodes, more than 10 PB of data, and high‑concurrency low‑latency queries. It combines a layered decoupled architecture, intelligent SQL optimizer, MPP+DAG engine, row‑column hybrid storage, multi‑dimensional indexing, GPU acceleration, and unstructured data analysis.

Round‑Table Discussion: Academia‑Industry Collaboration Status and Trends

Participants exchanged experiences on building POLARDB X, POLARDB, AnalyticDB, and Huawei Gauss, covering cloud‑native multi‑tenant solutions, high‑availability, row‑column storage, and multi‑model databases, while discussing how universities can translate research into enterprise‑critical systems.

The industry database R&D forum showcased China’s leading database research and application capabilities, establishing a lasting bridge between enterprises and academia to jointly drive the future of database technology in China.