Alibaba Cloud Upgrades AnalyticDB with Vector Database Engine as a One-Stop Solution for Building Generative AI Capabilities

Sector-specific AI-powered applications are made more accessible via cloud-native vector engine Upgraded One-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform for enhanced enterprise-level data management

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced an enhancement to its AnalyticDB vector engine, making it easier than ever for enterprises to access various large language models (LLMs) for building their customised generative AI capabilities. At its Data Management Summit hosted in Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its one-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform by introducing ApsaraDB HTAP (Hybrid Transactional & Analytical Processing), a dynamic solution that integrates cloud-native database PolarDB and cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB to provide comprehensive data processing and analysis capabilities to international customers.

Through an innovative integration framework, the AnalyticDB vector engine can connect with LLMs to deliver question answering features powered by the robust capabilities of LLMs. Enterprises can now input sector-specific knowledge into their vector databases, enabling them to build and launch generative AI applications in as little as 30 minutes. These customised AI models draw from each enterprise’s internal knowledge base to create content with specific enterprise details, enhancing operational efficiency and fostering innovation via business insights gleaned from efficiently and accurately retrieved data.

Building enterprise-specific generative AI models using fine-tuned training data can be a costly endeavour. However, the one-stop solution powered by AnalyticDB vector engine effectively lowers the financial and technical thresholds while offering strong cloud-native enterprise-level data protections through the Alibaba Cloud database management platform. AnalyticDB has already been utilised to support customers’ demand in scenarios such as text search and image search on e-commerce platforms with enhanced accuracy.

“As enterprises globally discern how best to adopt and use generative AI, we are seeing an increasing demand from our customers for database services that can support the creation of efficient, scalable, affordable and customisable AI models. With our upgraded AnalyticDB analytical database, enterprises can now leverage generative AI models that are tailored using their own knowledge base.” said Feifei Li, President of Database Products Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

One-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform upgraded to create more value for customers

At its Data Management Summit hosted in Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud also announced that ApsaraDB HTAP, a solution that integrates cloud-native databases PolarDB and AnalyticDB, is now available for international customers. ApsaraDB HTAP provides users with a unified platform that syncs the data from PolarDB’s transactional processing with AnalyticDB’s data analysis capabilities. This one-stop database management tool increases performance as well as provides extensive data processing capabilities that are highly elastic and cost effective. For example, by adopting the cloud-native HTAP solution, a customer from the gaming industry recently achieved performance increase by 100% with a cost reduction by 50%.

HTAP is a key technology improvement of the overall capability upgrade of PolarDB, Alibaba Cloud’s one-stop, cloud-native data management platform. With industry-leading technology features of serverless, three-tier decoupling, multi-master, and HTAP, the self-developed PolarDB help customers better manage and fully utilise their enterprise data.

“The trend of cloud-native, data fabric, integration, intelligent is driving the new wave of innovation for databases and has become the de facto standard of database industry. We look forward to further investing in our cloud-native database systems and finding new ways to help our customers grow amidst a rapidly changing business landscape,” said Feifei.

Alibaba Cloud is launching a database free trial program for the international customers to try out ten database products, including PolarDB, AnalyticDB RDS, Redis, among others. This portfolio of solutions covers backup, restoration, monitoring and migration, all designed to facilitate effective database management.

Driving the success of over 150,000 enterprise customers worldwide

Alibaba Cloud’s database product offerings support an exceptional amount of business activity worldwide and across a wide range of industries, including insurance, logistics, fintech, retail, education, manufacturing, gaming and more. Alibaba Cloud was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the third consecutive year in 2022.

“The acceleration of global digitalisation has been a key driver of demand for cloud-native database services, and we’ve been working hard to ensure our customers have the solutions they need to thrive. From increasing access to cutting edge technologies and capabilities to working with customers to leverage their data intelligence effectively, the market for database solutions is only set to grow and we’re excited to be supporting businesses to capture the resulting opportunities.” said Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

DOKU is one of Indonesia’s leading payment technology companies serving more than 150,000 merchants and more than five million e-wallet users in the country. DOKU looks for reliable, secure, scalable and cost-effective cloud computing services and has deployed a series of Alibaba Cloud products ranging from elastic compute service, network, to database. By adopting Alibaba Cloud database products including PolarDB and ApsaraDB RDS for Redis, Doku benefited from increased stability and the built-in high-availability option. The solutions freed the company’s personnel from many typical database management activities and helped implement a robust disaster recovery strategy.

Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), headquartered in Hong Kong and one of the world’s largest commercial Chinese TV program producers, used Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB to enhance their data management and help scale their services as viewership increased. Notably, PolarDB’s rapid elasticity and large volume storage capacity supported automatic scaling during viewer traffic peaks, while PolarDB ability to sync data allowed TVB to engage in real-time data analysis to improve decision-making.

enish Inc, a mobile game development company in Japan, leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s database solutions to enhance their business insights and game development journey. Alibaba Cloud’s data transmission and PolarDB offerings were combined with AnalyticDB to enable real-time analysis that helped developers enhance the player experience. A test environment for a new game was built in just 10 days, which was half the time it took previously. Moreover, the average data processing time was reduced by 50% while server costs were lowered by 30%.

Presto, Malaysia’s largest loyalty e-commerce redemption app adopted Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB, a cloud-native relational database to power its next phase of growth while maintaining cost efficiency, witnessing over 30% cost optimisation after the data migration according to the company. Following the successful database migration in the year 2020, Presto has since moved its e-commerce platform to Alibaba Cloud and is in the midst of migrating its entire IT system to Alibaba Cloud.

So Funny Company, a gaming studio with more than 200 million users globally and the developer of the popular games “Sausage Man” and “Idle Adventurers”, used Alibaba Cloud PolarDB to fulfill its requirement for automatic scaling, high availability, and high reliability to provide seamless experience for users. PolarDB helps So Funny Company significantly shortened maintenance time during game upgrades and server restart scenarios.

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About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.