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Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems

Summary: Proposes very lightweight locking (VLL) for in-memory DBs, replacing traditional lock managers. Paired with selective contention analysis (SCA), VLL sustains high throughput under contention, with experiments showing major locking-overhead reductions in single-machine and shared-nothing deployments. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
10821
Venue
VLDB
Year
2013
Pagerank
0.00010829638
Overall Rank
1,420 | 90.26%
DOI
10.14778/2535568.2535569

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{ren_vldb13,
        title = {{Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems}},
        author = {Ren, Kun and Thomson, Alexander and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {2},
        pages = {145--156},
        doi = {10.14778/2535568.2535569},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2535568.2535569},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 28 of 28 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
233 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 0.00023815642
473 Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores 2015 VLDB 0.00017900942
537 FOEDUS: OLTP Engine for a Thousand Cores and NVRAM 2015 SIGMOD 0.00016931517
755 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00014326008
867 Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems 2015 VLDB 0.00013511197
976 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB 0.00012864533
1,141 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.0001200422
1,345 The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale 2017 VLDB 0.00011090483
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
2,234 Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention 2016 SIGMOD 8.8937932e-05
2,765 An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems 2014 VLDB 8.1530951e-05
2,998 Handling Highly Contended OLTP Workloads Using Fast Dynamic Partitioning 2020 SIGMOD 7.8727047e-05
3,053 Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 7.8098188e-05
3,198 Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution 2016 SIGMOD 7.6434062e-05
3,204 BCC: Reducing False Aborts in Optimistic Concurrency Control with Low Cost for In-Memory Databases 2016 VLDB 7.639049e-05
3,860 Analyzing the Impact of System Architecture on the Scalability of OLTP Engines for High-Contention Workloads 2018 VLDB 7.0670192e-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
4,297 Graph Analytics Through Fine-Grained Parallelism 2016 SIGMOD 6.7770261e-05
4,356 Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All 2017 CIDR 6.7470661e-05
6,265 Scalable Database Logging for Multicores 2018 VLDB 5.9356364e-05
6,770 PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory 2024 SIGMOD 5.7783709e-05
7,434 Database Isolation By Scheduling 2021 VLDB 5.619487e-05
9,517 Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads? 2025 SIGMOD 5.2566631e-05
9,954 Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates 2021 VLDB 5.1895077e-05
10,700 TXSQL: Lock Optimizations Towards High Contented Workloads 2025 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,526 Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch 2022 PODS 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
57 Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00040139242
68 The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite) 2007 VLDB 0.00038446206
157 OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There 2008 SIGMOD 0.0002863588
172 High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases 2012 VLDB 0.00027281663
256 Data-Oriented Transaction Execution 2010 VLDB 0.00023172982
260 Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications 1985 SIGMOD 0.00023103999
766 The Case for Determinism in Database Systems 2010 VLDB 0.0001420984
1,282 Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance 2009 VLDB 0.00011338762
1,445 Recovery and Coherency-Control Protocols for Fast Intersystem Page Transfer and Fine-Granularity Locking in a Shared Disks Transaction Environment 1991 VLDB 0.00010769388
1,458 Adaptive Locking Strategies in a Multi-node Data Sharing Environment 1991 VLDB 0.00010723424
3,189 Locking and Latching in a Memory-Resident Database System 1992 VLDB 7.6543667e-05
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# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 4,356 Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All 2017 CIDR
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3 233 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD
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5 2,309 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD
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