X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing

Alibaba runs the largest e-commerce platform in the world serving more than 600 million customers, with a GMV (gross merchandise value) exceeding USD 768 billion in FY2018. Online e-commerce transactions have three notable characteristics: (1) drastic increase of transactions per second with the kickoff of major sales and promotion events, (2) a large number of hot records that can easily overwhelm system buffers, and (3) quick shift of the "temperature'' (hot v.s. warm v.s. cold) of different records due to the availability of promotions on different categories over different short time periods. For example, Alibaba's OLTP database clusters experienced a 122 times increase of transactions on the start of the Singles' Day Global Shopping Festival in 2018, processing up to 491,000 sales transactions per second which translate to more than 70 million database transactions per second. To address these challenges, we introduce X-Engine, a write-optimized storage engine of POLARDB built at Alibaba, which utilizes a tiered storage architecture with the LSM-tree (log-structured merge tree) to leverage hardware acceleration such as FPGA-accelerated compactions, and a suite of optimizations including asynchronous writes in transactions, multi-staged pipelines and incremental cache replacement during compactions. Evaluation results show that X-Engine has outperformed other storage engines under such transactional workloads.