Extending Polaris to Support Transactions
Josep Aguilar-Saborit, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Kevin Bocksrocker, Alan Halverson, Konstantin Kosinsky, Ryan O'Connor, Nadejda Poliakova, Moe Shafiei, Haris Mahmood Ansari, Bogdan Crivat, Conor Cunningham, Taewoo Kim, P. Kim, Ishan Rajesh Madan, Blazej Matuszyk, Matt Miles, Sumin Mohanan, Cristian Petculescu, Emma Rose Wirshing, Elias Yousefi Amin Abadi · 2024
In Polaris [1], we introduced a cloud-native distributed query processor to perform analytics at scale. In this paper, we extend the underlying Polaris distributed computation framework, which can be thought of as a read-only transaction engine, to execute general transactions (including updates, deletes, inserts and bulk loads, in addition to queries) for Tier 1 warehousing workloads in a highly performant and predictable manner. We take advantage of the immutability of data files in log-structured data stores and build on SQL Server transaction management to deliver full transactional support with Snapshot Isolation semantics, including multi-table and multi-statement transactions. With the enhancements described in this paper, Polaris supports both query processing and transactions for T-SQL in Microsoft Fabric [2].