There was a time when talking to someone over the phone was not thought possible, and the only available means of communication was through letters. The concept of shopping from home was not even invented yet, and people didn’t know that there would be such a thing as computers or laptops. Over the course of time, the world has witnessed a paradigm shift. From keeping things the traditional way, the world transitioned to and is still moving towards technological advancements. The world today has shrunk into a digital village where there are so many opportunities for every aspect of every life, a thought that was once close to impossible. 

It is the brilliance and innovative ideas of scientists, specialists, and programmers that have created an array of solutions for every problem. From things as small as radios to things as big as refrigerators, along with everything in between including smart-refrigerators, soft bots, and automated-cars, are contributing towards a convenient lifestyle. Regardless of the sectors, every single field has been taken to the digital platform and giving fruitful outcomes. 

One of the greatest impact and the greatest outcome observed is in the field of eCommerce. There is nothing people like more than sitting at home and being able to buy their desired products. Not only does it benefit customers by saving their time and effort, but it has also made things for entrepreneurs interested in opening a business. However, like everything else, eCommerce is a double-edged sword as well. Due to the ease of staying at home, people have stopped shopping from stores causing data glitches, including traffic and an excessive amount of data. 

Up until three years ago, a tool for making data management was also thought impossible, and that is until Alibaba Cloud launched a beta version of its Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), the PolarDB.  This smart cloud-hosted database is proving to be one of the greatest innovations in assisting eCommerce businesses.

Serving more than 600,000 million customers, Alibaba is the largest eCommerce platform in the world. A large number of customers meant a huge amount of data, so for handling the continuous stream of data, PolarDB was released in September 2017 for beta testing. 

Since its commercial release in 2018, PolarDb has made database management efficient and more convenient for eCommerce businesses. It can hold up to 100TB in storage, making big data development easy. PolarDB also has 88 vCPUs and 710GB of memory allowing business owners to minimize the costs alongside managing huge chunks of data.

PolarDB is a new generation of a cloud-native database that uses a distributed shared-storage architecture. This feature enables online retailers to organize their databases and massive amounts of data in a better and more easy way. 

A major prerequisite in the digital transformation of businesses and the foundation for all businesses is RDBMSs, and the market has a wide range of top-quality RDBMSs from MySQL to Oracle DB, and from SQLite to PostgreSQL to choose from. Even though these tools were for great options, they presented major issues that include as data backup, the performance of databases, upgrades, disk capacities, and a lot more. With the increase in the volume of data, the time required for backing up,  migrating, and scaling data also increases. These delays cause major hindrances in company operations. 

In an attempt to reduce and ultimately eradicate these setbacks, PolarDB was created that took convenience in management to greater heights. With the innovation in the existing DBaaS model, the RDBMS addresses all previous problems presented by the cloud-hosted database to businesses. By integrating the latest technologies of IT hardware, such as high-speed network and storage devices, this innovative tool has made promises for a better future for all businesses. 

Combining traditional enterprise with performance, PolarDB allows businesses to benefit from its features, including full compatibility, high performance, flexibility, read-only nodes, self-adaptive data scalability, and high availability.

The reason why PolarDB is the best tool is its two unmatchable features. The first feature is PolarFS, about which a paper was published in the VLDB conference in 2018. The second feature is X-engine, about which a paper was published in SIGMOD in 2019. PolarFS is an ultra-low latency and failure resilient distributed file system for a shared storage cloud database, and X-engine is an optimized storage engine for large-scale eCommerce transaction processing. 

On November 11, 2019, during Singles’ Day event activities, Alibaba was faced with critical challenges. They had to manage a drastic increase of transactions per second with the kickoff of major sales and promotional events and tackle a large number of hot records, which were overwhelming system buffers, and quick shift of the “temperature” of different records due to the availability of promotions on different categories over different short time periods. This was when the feature, X-engine, proved to be a useful feature that helped them manage tasks efficiently. Through this, Alibaba was able to process more than 491,000 sales transactions per second.

Due to PolarDB’s management services, Alibaba Cloud was ranked third globally by Gartner’s Database Management System Cloud Services Revenue in 2018. This RDBMS is proving to be a very useful tool for businesses. Not only is it a major contributor to the growth in the sector, but it also makes up 13% of the entire world’s economy. This latest innovative technology is making things easier and convenient for businesses to shift to the digital platform.