Updated on 2025-09-24 GMT+08:00

Advantages

DWS supports ANSI/ISO SQL-92, SQL-99, and SQL-2003 syntax, as well as the PostgreSQL, Oracle, Teradata, and MySQL database ecosystems. It offers powerful solutions for analyzing massive amounts of data in different industries, even at the petabyte scale.

DWS outperforms conventional data warehouses in hyper-scale data processing and general platform management due to the following features:

Ease of use

  • Visualized one-stop management

    DWS helps you easily complete the entire process, from project concept to production deployment. The DWS console allows you to quickly set up a high-performance and highly available enterprise-level data warehouse cluster in just a few minutes, without requiring any data warehouse software or servers.

    With just a few clicks, you can easily connect applications to the data warehouse, back up data, restore data, and monitor data warehouse resources and performance.

  • Seamless integration with big data

    Without the need to migrate data, you can use standard SQL statements to directly query data on HDFS and OBS.

  • Heterogeneous database migration tools

    DWS provides various migration tools to migrate SQL scripts of Oracle and Teradata to DWS.

High performance

  • Cloud-based distributed architecture

    DWS adopts the MPP architecture so that service data is separately stored on numerous nodes. Data analytics tasks are quickly executed in parallel on the nodes where data is stored.

  • Query response to trillions of data records within seconds

    DWS improves data query performance by executing multi-thread operators in parallel, running commands in registers in parallel with the vectorized computing engine, and reducing redundant judgment conditions using LLVM.

    DWS provides you with a better data compression ratio (column-store), higher index performance (column-store), and better point update and query (row-store) performance.

    Furthermore, DWS has achieved a significant breakthrough in overcoming the performance limitations of traditional column-store execution engines. Unlike the original column-store engine, the Turbo engine enhances both memory and disk storage formats for string and numeric data types. Additionally, it optimizes the performance of key operators, such as sorting, aggregation, join, and scanning, effectively doubling the overall performance of the executor and significantly reducing service computing costs.

  • Fast data loading

    DWS provides you with GDS, a high-speed parallel bulk data loading tool.

  • Data Compression in Column Storage

    To compress old and inactive data to save space and reduce procurement and O&M costs.

    In DWS, data can be compressed using the Delta Value Encoding, Dictionary, RLE, LZ4, and ZLIB algorithms. The system automatically selects a compression algorithm based on data characteristics. The average compression ratio is 7:1. Compressed data can be directly accessed and is transparent to services, greatly reducing the preparation time before accessing historical data.

High scalability

  • On-demand scale-out: With the shared-nothing open architecture, nodes can be added at any time to enhance the data storage, query, and analysis capabilities of the system.
  • Enhanced linear performance after scale-out: The capacity and performance increase linearly with the cluster scale. The linear rate is 0.8.
  • Service continuity: During scale-out, data can be added, deleted, modified, and queried, and DDL operations (DROP/TRUNCATE/ALTER TABLE) can be performed. Table-level scale-out ensures service continuity.
  • Online upgrade: Upgrading major versions online from 8.1.1 and performing online patch upgrades from 8.1.3 and later versions is now possible without interrupting your services. Any interruptions will only last a few seconds.

Robust reliability

  • Transaction management
    • Transaction blocks are supported. You can run start transaction to explicitly start a transaction block.
    • Single-statement transactions are supported. If you do not explicitly start a transaction, a single statement is processed as a transaction.
    • Distributed transaction management and global transaction information management are supported. This includes gxid, snapshot, timestamp management, distributed transaction status management, and gxid overflow processing.
    • The atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) feature is supported, which ensures strong data consistency for distributed transactions.
    • Deadlocks are prevented in the distributed system. A transaction will be unlocked immediately after a deadlock (if any).
  • Comprehensive HA design

    All software processes of DWS are in active/standby mode. Logical components such as the CNs and DNs of each cluster also work in active/standby mode. This ensures data reliability and consistency when any single point of failure (SPOF) occurs.

  • High security

    DWS supports transparent data encryption and can interconnect with the Database Security Service (DBSS) to better protect user privacy and data security with network isolation and security group rule setting options. In addition, DWS supports automatic full and incremental backup of data for higher reliability.

Low cost

  • Pay-per-use: DWS is billed based on the usage and use duration. You only need to pay for the resources you use.
  • Flexible investment in infrastructure: You do not need to invest much in infrastructure in the early stage. You can start from a data warehouse instance with low specifications and flexibly scale it up and down at any time.