Data Management in Microservices: State of the Practice, Challenges, and Research Directions

Summary: Systematic empirical study of data management in microservices via literature review, open-source apps, and a practitioner survey to map practice. Identifies core system-level challenges and proposes microservice-oriented database features. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12733
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 7.5297116e-05
Overall Rank: 3,313 | 77.28%
DOI: 10.14778/3484224.3484232

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Rodrigo Laigner (University of Copenhagen)
2. Yongluan Zhou (University of Copenhagen)
3. Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles (University of Copenhagen)
4. Yijian Liu (University of Copenhagen)
5. Marcos Kalinowski (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro)

BibTeX Citation

@article{laigner_vldb21,
        title = {{Data Management in Microservices: State of the Practice, Challenges, and Research Directions}},
        author = {Laigner, Rodrigo and Zhou, Yongluan and Salles, Marcos Antonio Vaz and Liu, Yijian and Kalinowski, Marcos},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {13},
        pages = {3348--3361},
        doi = {10.14778/3484224.3484232},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3484224.3484232},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,767	Epoxy: ACID Transactions Across Diverse Data Stores	2023	VLDB	5.5485804e-05
7,971	Modernization of Databases in the Cloud Era: Building Databases that Run like Legos	2023	VLDB	5.5160445e-05
8,406	ScalarDB: Universal Transaction Manager for Polystores	2023	VLDB	5.4314245e-05
8,696	Transactions Make Debugging Easy	2023	CIDR	5.3830471e-05
8,874	Stateful Entities: Object-oriented Cloud Applications as Distributed Dataflows	2023	CIDR	5.3536236e-05
9,116	PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads	2023	VLDB	5.3205884e-05
9,895	DARQ Matter Binds Everything: Performant and Composable Cloud Programming via Resilient Steps	2023	SIGMOD	5.1997534e-05
10,633	Transactional Cloud Applications Go with the (Data)Flow	2025	CIDR	5.093636e-05
10,782	Styx: Transactional Stateful Functions on Streaming Dataflows	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,926	Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
64	Sagas	1987	SIGMOD	0.00038756588
73	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00037333356
1,961	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.4000927e-05
2,368	What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research	2017	SIGMOD	8.6827828e-05
3,186	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.6559187e-05

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