POLARDB Meets Computational Storage: Efficiently Support Analytical Workloads in Cloud-Native Relational Database

This paper reports the deployment of computational storage drives in Alibaba Cloud to enable cloud-native relational database cost-effectively support analytical workloads. With its compute-storage decoupled architecture, cloud-native relational database should pushdown data-intensive tasks (e.g., table scan) from front-end database nodes to back-end storage nodes in order to adequately support analytical workloads. This however makes it a challenge to maintain the cost effectiveness of storage nodes. The emerging computational storage opens a new opportunity to address this challenge: By replacing commodity SSDs with computational storage drives, storage nodes can leverage the in-storage computing power to much more efficiently perform table scans. Practical implementation of this simple idea is non-trivial and demands cohesive innovations across the software (i.e., database, filesystem and I/O) and hardware (i.e., computational storage drive) layers. This paper presents such a holistic implementation for Alibaba cloud-native relational database POLARDB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world deployment of cloud-native databases with computational storage drives ever reported in the open literature.