The Case for Determinism in Database Systems

Summary: Proposes deterministic concurrency control enforcing a predetermined serial order, enabling synchronization-free active replication and eliminating two-phase commit—even for distributed transactions. A simple deadlock-avoidance scheme yields strong availability and performance benefits. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 10234
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.0001420984
Overall Rank: 766 | 94.75%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920853

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexander Thomson (Yale University)
2. Daniel J. Abadi (Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{thomson_vldb10,
        title = {{The Case for Determinism in Database Systems}},
        author = {Thomson, Alexander and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        pages = {70--80},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920853},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920853},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 43 of 43 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
57	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040139242
144	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029554682
233	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023815642
526	TrustedDB: A Trusted Hardware based Database with Privacy and Data Confidentiality	2011	SIGMOD	0.00017112934
655	ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015263509
976	The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign	2016	VLDB	0.00012864533
1,255	Fast Checkpoint Recovery Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications	2011	SIGMOD	0.00011472627
1,345	The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00011090483
1,420	Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems	2013	VLDB	0.00010829638
1,570	Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010334131
1,700	Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database	2020	VLDB	9.9726588e-05
1,775	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.7870611e-05
1,926	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.4705999e-05
2,388	Low-Overhead Asynchronous Checkpointing in Main-Memory Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	8.6474765e-05
2,765	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB	8.1530951e-05
3,053	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.8098188e-05
3,082	Analytics in Motion: High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database	2015	SIGMOD	7.7725834e-05
3,088	Query Fresh: Log Shipping on Steroids	2018	VLDB	7.7694381e-05
3,198	Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution	2016	SIGMOD	7.6434062e-05
3,687	MaaT: Effective and scalable coordination of distributed transactions in the cloud	2014	VLDB	7.2019738e-05
3,967	STAR: Scaling Transactions through Asymmetric Replication	2019	VLDB	6.984665e-05
3,975	Scalable Replay-Based Replication For Fast Databases	2017	VLDB	6.9802959e-05
3,985	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.9738485e-05
4,218	Reducing Database Locking Contention Through Multi-version Concurrency	2014	VLDB	6.8261118e-05
4,339	NeuChain: A Fast Permissioned Blockchain System with Deterministic Ordering	2022	VLDB	6.7548559e-05
4,869	Epoch-based Commit and Replication in Distributed OLTP Databases	2021	VLDB	6.4709867e-05
5,705	Cornus: Atomic Commit for a Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation	2023	VLDB	6.1145567e-05
6,402	C5: Cloned Concurrency Control that Always Keeps Up	2023	VLDB	5.8859793e-05
6,770	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	5.7783709e-05
6,811	GeoGauss: Strongly Consistent and Light-Coordinated OLTP for Geo-Replicated SQL Database	2023	SIGMOD	5.7658045e-05
6,867	Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated Systems	2024	VLDB	5.7506468e-05
7,049	MgCrab: Transaction Crabbing for Live Migration in Deterministic Database Systems	2019	VLDB	5.7177768e-05
7,683	Don’t Look Back, Look into the Future: Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	5.5681274e-05
8,041	Hybrid Deterministic and Nondeterministic Execution of Transactions in Actor Systems	2022	SIGMOD	5.5016893e-05
8,367	T-Part: Partitioning of Transactions for Forward-Pushing in Deterministic Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	5.4420052e-05
9,409	NV-SQL: Boosting OLTP Performance with Non-Volatile DIMMs	2023	VLDB	5.2750967e-05
9,517	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2566631e-05
10,234	Epoch-based Optimistic Concurrency Control in Geo-replicated Databases	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,680	Ultraverse: An Efficient What-if Analysis Framework for Software Applications Interacting with Database Systems	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,798	Wait and See: A Delayed Transactions Partitioning Approach in Deterministic Database Systems for Better Performance	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,993	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,247	Spectrum: Speedy and Strictly-Deterministic Smart Contract Transactions for Blockchain Ledgers	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,279	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
68	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00038446206
164	The Dangers of Replication and a Solution	1996	SIGMOD	0.00027698879
1,152	Fast Algorithms for Maintaining Replica Consistency in Lazy Master Replicated Databases	1999	VLDB	0.00011935493
1,247	Don't be lazy, be consistent: Postgres-R, A new way to implement Database Replication	2000	VLDB	0.00011500006
1,660	A Mean Value Performance Model for Locking in Databases: The Waiting Case	1984	PODS	0.00010079249
2,438	FAS - a Freshness-Sensitive Coordination Middleware for a Cluster of OLAP Components	2002	VLDB	8.57985e-05
2,484	Update Propagation Protocols For Replicated Databases	1999	SIGMOD	8.5147322e-05
2,674	An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse	2006	VLDB	8.2709176e-05
3,921	Evaluation of Remote Backup Algorithms for Transaction Processing Systems	1992	SIGMOD	7.0163985e-05
5,578	Relaxed Currency Serializability for Middle-Tier Caching and Replication	2006	SIGMOD	6.1640074e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,829	Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores	2019	VLDB
2	7,736	How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?	2017	PODS
3	7,984	Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines	1989	SIGMOD
4	11,649	Efficient Deterministic Concurrency Control Under Practical Isolation Levels	2021	SIGMOD
5	13,210	DEADLOCK-FREEDOM (AND SAFETY) OF TRANSACTIONS IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE (Extended Abstract)	1985	PODS
6	5,324	Detock: High Performance Multi-region Transactions at Scale	2023	SIGMOD
7	5,910	Replication, Consistency, and Practicality: Are These Mutually Exclusive?	1998	SIGMOD
8	13,034	A Transaction Replication Scheme for a Replicated Database with Node Autonomy	1994	VLDB
9	3,333	Distributed Concurrency Control Performance: A Study of Algorithms, Distribution, and Replication	1988	VLDB
10	2,765	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB