ArticlePolaris: Inside Microsoft's Distributed SQL Query Engine
A deep reference article on Polaris — the cloud-native distributed SQL engine powering Fabric Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoints. Covers the engine's two founding design goals, the cell-based data model, distributed query compilation with the Cascades optimizer, task DAG execution, stateless compute, fault tolerance, cache-affinitized scheduling, workload-graph scheduling, and published benchmark scale results. Every claim is cited from the VLDB 2020 research paper or Microsoft Learn workload-management documentation.