PolarDB-X
4 published articles
Databases · AI
MySQL's P99 hit 48 seconds on AI sessions. PolarDB-X cut it to 1.5
MySQL was the odd one out in AI session storage, with no standard path for the MB-scale blobs modern conversations produce. PolarDB-X external columns route them to OSS while keeping InnoDB transactions and plain SQL, and the published benchmarks show write tail latency collapsing from 48.7 seconds to 1.5.
2026-09-16
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
Distributed databases
Five database optimizations that turned 10-second queries into milliseconds
Large order tables in distributed databases suffer from unstable index selection, expensive table lookups, and wasted partition scans. This analysis presents five production-tested optimizations for PolarDB-X, with real-world latency drops from seconds to milliseconds.
2024-08-01
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