Why Alibaba Cloud Dominates China’s Relational Database Market in 2020

IDC’s 2020 China Relational Database Market Research Report reveals that Alibaba Cloud holds more than 28% market share, ranking first in both the overall relational database market and the cloud relational database segment.

In 2020, relational databases deployed on public‑cloud platforms exceeded traditional offline deployments for the first time, capturing 51.5% of the market, with projections of 73.5% by 2025.

Relational databases remain a core technology across finance, government, telecom, logistics, and internet sectors, with demand shifting toward cloud services, cloud‑native, distributed, and analytical architectures.

Alibaba Cloud, an early entrant in cloud databases, combines cloud‑native and distributed designs to deliver high scalability, ease of use, rapid iteration, and low cost.

Its self‑developed cloud‑native database, PolarDB , is China’s first cloud‑native database, featuring a storage‑compute separation architecture and integrated design that delivers performance up to six times that of MySQL at only one‑tenth the cost of traditional commercial databases.

PolarDB’s distributed low‑cost advantage together with centralized usability meets large‑scale enterprise cloud requirements. In 2020, PolarDB won the China Computer Society’s “Science and Technology Progress First Prize,” fully supported the 2020 Double‑11 shopping festival, and achieved a peak throughput of 140 million TPS.

Alibaba Cloud’s RDS (Relational Database Service) is the largest and most stable cloud database in China, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and SQL Server. Recently, RDS introduced an enterprise‑grade autonomous database that reduces operational costs by 90% while offering 99.99% availability and RPO = 0.

The company’s cloud database portfolio—PolarDB, AnalyticDB, RDS, and Lindorm—covers online transaction processing, analytics, HTAP, and IoT scenarios, serving Alibaba Group’s massive user base and a wide range of industries including internet, finance, government, telecom, transportation, and energy, with notable customers such as the State Taxation Administration, China Post, China Life, China Southern Airlines, and AIA.