Tantor Polar is a distributed database management system that separates computing and storage resources while maintaining full compatibility with PostgreSQL. This architecture powers the Tantor XData Gen3 database machine, which integrates high-performance computing nodes, shared storage, and an RDMA-enabled network.
The system allows independent scaling of resources: adding computing nodes increases processing power and RAM, while expanding storage addresses I/O and capacity limits. Tantor PolarFS, a distributed file system based on Alibaba PolarFS, manages the storage layer, utilizing NVMe-oF and RDMA for low-latency data access.
Performance optimizations include LogIndex for multi-threaded WAL playback, WAL pipelining for batch processing, and the CSN mechanism for efficient MVCC visibility checks. These features reduce replication lag to a few milliseconds and significantly improve read and write speeds compared to standard PostgreSQL implementations.
Tantor XData Gen3 hardware features multi-core AMD processors, NVMe storage, and 100 Gbit/s Infiniband/RoCE v2 networking. The storage nodes use Linux MD Cluster to form RAID 1 arrays across a fully connected mesh, supporting high-speed data mirroring and traffic isolation.
In TPC-B benchmark testing using pgbench with 1,000 clients and 256 jobs on a 1 TB database, the system achieved an average performance of approximately 250,000 transactions per second. The architecture also supports massive parallel processing for complex analytical queries via the PX/ePQ mechanism.
