Databases
SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and data modeling.
3 published articles
Database Engineering
Alibaba's Panda Index gives InnoDB unique keys a version history they never had
Panda Index pushes the clustered index's versioning down into unique-key records, adding transaction columns and an independent undo chain. The result is one record lock instead of several gap locks, and index-only reads that never touch the clustered index. Independent benchmarks are still missing.
2026-08-06
Vector Databases
Inside Alibaba's engineering push to make pgvector work at billion-vector scale
Alibaba Cloud details how it transformed pgvector from an open-source extension into a production-grade vector engine supporting billions of vectors with millisecond response times, through quantization, performance tuning, ecosystem tools, distributed scaling, and deep kernel integration.
2023-10-11
Database
Alibaba just cut 70% off database index bloat. The trick is in the prefixes.
Secondary indexes often dominate database storage, especially in SaaS and e-commerce. PolarDB-X introduces secondary prefix compression (SPC), a lightweight per-page dictionary scheme that reduces index space by 30% to 70% without heavy CPU overhead. Benchmarks show up to 47% throughput improvement in I/O-bound read workloads.
2020-10-22