PolarDB Brings Alibaba Cloud Another SIGMOD Best Paper Award

This article introduces how Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB won another SIGMOD Best Paper Award for its breakthrough CXL based distributed memory pool architecture.

On June 26, at SIGMOD 2025, a leading international conference on databases held in Berlin, Germany, Alibaba Cloud PolarDB was awarded the Best Industrial Paper. PolarDB was recognized for its pioneering work on a distributed memory pool (DMP) architecture powered by the Compute Express Link (CXL) Switch technology. This marks the second consecutive year PolarDB has taken home the top honor of SIGMOD, as a testament to the sustained breakthroughs of Alibaba Cloud in memory disaggregation and leadership in database innovation.

The award-winning paper presents PolarCXLMem, a DMP architecture built based on the CXL protocol, which has already been applied as the PolarDB DMP feature. As the industry's first cloud database application powered by the CXL Switch technology, PolarDB DMP tackles long-standing challenges in traditional Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)-based systems, including bandwidth bottlenecks, high latency, and inefficient recovery.

In memory pooling scenarios, PolarDB DMP delivers up to 2.1 times higher performance than RDMA-based systems. PolarDB DMP has been deployed within the three-layer decoupled architecture of PolarDB, enabling the architecture to handle real-time online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads while addressing system-level challenges such as elastic memory resource scheduling, cross-node cache sharing, and fast recovery from failures. In addition, PolarDB DMP shows strong adaptability in emerging workloads such as foundation model inference and columnar data storage. The paper also underscores the broader potential of CXL switches for scalable memory expansion and high-speed interconnects across heterogeneous components. It documents the first commercial deployment of the CXL Switch technology in the world, a milestone that has drawn widespread attention across the industry.

Figure: PolarDB wins the Best Paper Award at SIGMOD 2025

ACM SIGMOD is one of the most influential conferences in the database community. At SIGMOD 2025, nearly 20 papers from Alibaba Cloud were accepted into the main program. As a global barometer of cutting-edge database research, SIGMOD has shown growing interest in technical challenges such as performance bottlenecks and memory overhead in cloud-native database architectures. Traditional RDMA-based architectures have inherent limits, including read/write amplification, bandwidth constraints, and low recovery efficiency. To address these issues, the PolarDB team, in collaboration with the Alibaba Cloud server team, developed PolarCXLMem, a DMP system based on the CXL 2.0 protocol. By using high-speed CXL interconnects, PolarCXLMem reduces latency to sub-100 nanoseconds, significantly cutting synchronization latency and bandwidth overhead, while dramatically improving cross-node consistency management.

The SIGMOD review committee gave high marks to the breakthrough innovation of PolarDB. One reviewer commented: "This paper provides a practical solution for memory disaggregation by using the CXL interconnect technology. The solution's successful integration into real-world cloud database workloads further demonstrates a strong connection between theoretical innovation and engineering practice, making it a highly valuable research contribution."

PolarCXLMem is deployed on the Alibaba Cloud Panjiu server platform, supporting memory pooling at a 10 TB scale, with 100 nanosecond-level end-to-end latency and throughput measured in terabytes per second. Under identical memory pooling configurations, PolarDB DMP powered by PolarCXLMem delivers 2.1 times higher throughput compared with traditional RDMA-based systems. PolarDB DMP offers a viable and scalable solution for high-concurrency, strong-consistency scenarios such as e-commerce and finance, and also addresses the challenges of consistency management in multi-master databases. In addition, the PolarDB team introduced a novel fast-recovery mechanism built on PolarCXLMem that enables instantaneous cache pool rebooting. Compared with RDMA-based systems, PolarDB DMP achieves five times faster recovery, substantially reducing system downtime.

Moreover, PolarDB DMP has shown strong potential for emerging workloads such as foundation model inference and multimodal data storage. In particular, its KV cache pooling supports elastic cross-node scheduling and remote access, significantly improving inference performance. The long-term vision is to enable centralized memory pool management across cloud databases and AI inference platforms.

Figure: PolarDB DMP architecture based on the CXL Switch technology

The award-winning paper, titled Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases, was co-authored by the Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB team and Panjiu server team, and received the Best Industrial Paper Award at SIGMOD 2025. This marks yet another top-tier recognition for PolarDB, following previous Best Paper Awards at SIGMOD 2023, SIGMOD 2024, and ICDE 2024, further demonstrating the deep expertise and sustained innovation of Alibaba Cloud in database technologies.

It is reported that, as China's first in-house cloud-native database, PolarDB has earned widespread industry recognition, with more than 10,000 enterprise users to date. It has been deployed at scale across mission-critical systems in sectors including public services, finance, telecommunications, logistics, and the Internet. Alibaba Cloud has ranked first in China's relational database market for six consecutive years, and has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems for five years running. Notably, it remains the first and only Chinese company to be positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant for foundational software.

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PolarDB Brings Alibaba Cloud Another SIGMOD Best Paper Award

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