The world is rapidly moving towards technological advancements. Computer scientists, programmers, and IT specialists work together to create innovative solutions to the problems. With commercial-level soft robots, driver-less cars in the pipeline, and solutions such as automation and digitalization, the world is moving towards a convenient lifestyle. From the healthcare sector to the corporate world, technological solutions are making the lives easy and simple. When it comes to digitalization, eCommerce is the greatest outcome. People love the convenience of online shopping as it saves their time as well as effort.

Moreover, it has made starting a retail business cost-effective and easy. Aspiring entrepreneurs can set up a digital business without a huge budget. They just have to create an eCommerce website and implement a smart digital marketing strategy, and that is it.

Due to the rise of eCommerce, many consumers have stopped shopping from brick-and-mortar stores. It exposes the eCommerce stores to excessive traffic and a massive amount of data. The companies have to gather all the data and use it to make smart decisions for their business. However, none of the companies are equipped to organize a massive amount of data. Even Alibaba, the largest eCommerce platform in the world, had to face innumerable challenges in data management until 2017, when Alibaba Cloud launched a beta version of its Relational Database Management System, RDBMS, PolarDB.

The way eCommerce businesses organize their data by addressing these issues, determine their decision-making capabilities. The RDMBS by Alibaba Cloud is a smart cloud-hosted database that is proving of immense help to the eCommerce businesses since it was commercially launched in the year 2018.

Better Management of Data, Better Decision-Making Skills

PolarDB uses a distributed shared-storage architecture, which is what helps online retailers better manage their databases and massive amounts of data. There is no denying there; RDBMSs serve as the foundation of companies worldwide and a major prerequisite in the digital transformation of businesses. There are several cloud-hosted databases, but there were some major issues that enterprises had to deal with to ensure the smooth working of operations. The major problems revolve around matters such as data backup, the performance of databases, upgrades, disk capacities, and much more. As the volume of data increases, it increases the time required for scaling, backing up, and migrating data. The delays due to these problems are a major hindrance to company operations. However, with PolarDB, Alibaba Cloud was able to redefine the way the cloud-hosted database performs. By innovating the existing DBaaS model, the RDBMS addresses all previous problems that cloud-hosted database was exposing businesses to.

Cloud-native databases have made businesses hopeful and are promising businesses a better future. PolarDB is an innovative tool that makes use of innovative technologies. The RDBMS incorporates the latest technologies of IT hardware, such as high-speed network and storage devices. Distributed storage architecture separates compute and storage. Moreover, companies can benefit from its features, including full compatibility, high performance, flexibility, read-only nodes, self-adaptive data scalability, and high availability.

PolarFS and X-Engine

Two features that make PolarDB a smart option for e-commerce businesses are PolarFS; a paper about it was published in the VLDB conference in 2018, and X-engine, a paper it was published in SIGMOD in 2019. PolarFS is an ultra-low latency and failure resilient distributed file system for a shared storage cloud database. X-engine is an optimized storage engine for large-scale eCommerce transaction processing. The X-engine was a feature that helped Alibaba during Singles’ Day event activities on November 11, 2019.

Alibaba was facing critical challenges, including management of a drastic increase of transactions per second with the kickoff of major sales and promotion events. In addition to this, they had to 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. With X-engine for PolarDB, they were able to process more than 491,000 sales transactions per second.

The Bottom Line

PolarDB is an RDBMS that is proving useful for businesses in innumerable ways. The cloud-hosted database provides up to 100TB in storage, and up to 88vCPUs and 710GB of memory for computation. An update was released in 2019, providing compatible features with MySQL, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL, which further eased out the matters for businesses. eCommerce platforms can easily manage big data development. Alibaba Cloud has migrated about 400,000 database instances to the cloud. The perfect example of the effectiveness of PolarDB is its performance in the toughest pressure test of Alibaba Group’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. Alibaba Cloud is taking things to a higher level of convenience for eCommerce businesses. It is one of the major contributors to the growth of this sector as it now makes up 13% of the entire world’s economy. By making things easy for an online retailer, PolarDB encourages brick-and-mortar retail store owners to transition to the digital platform.