Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable

Summary: Sonata makes multi-database transactions fast and globally serializable by combining commitment-ordering with 2PC and performing only non-blocking, prepare-time coordination via application-level shims that reuse each DB's local concurrency control. No DB internals or query changes; ~7% coordination overhead on TPC-C and up to 11.1x improvement over prior work. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 14161
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 10,926 | 25.04%
DOI: 10.14778/3748191.3748207

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Chuzhe Tang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
2. Zhaoguo Wang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
3. Jinyang Li (New York University)
4. Haibo Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{tang_vldb25,
        title = {{Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable}},
        author = {Tang, Chuzhe and Wang, Zhaoguo and Li, Jinyang and Chen, Haibo},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '25},
        volume = {18},
        number = {10},
        pages = {3449--3462},
        doi = {10.14778/3748191.3748207},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3748191.3748207},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 25 of 25 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
19	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00058720861
64	Sagas	1987	SIGMOD	0.00038756588
144	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029554682
182	Federated Database Systems for Managing Distributed, Heterogeneous, and Autonomous Databases	1991	VLDB	0.00026367971
208	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024968157
226	OLTP-Bench: An Extensible Testbed for Benchmarking Relational Databases	2014	VLDB	0.00024027277
245	Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases	2008	SIGMOD	0.00023458287
733	Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL	2012	VLDB	0.00014533437
1,334	Improving Optimistic Concurrency Control Through Transaction Batching and Operation Reordering	2019	VLDB	0.00011123567
2,523	Multidatabase Update Issues	1988	SIGMOD	8.4705778e-05
2,998	Handling Highly Contended OLTP Workloads Using Fast Dynamic Partitioning	2020	SIGMOD	7.8727047e-05
3,013	Opportunities for Optimism in Contended Main-Memory Multicore Transactions	2020	VLDB	7.8518631e-05
3,198	Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution	2016	SIGMOD	7.6434062e-05
3,313	Data Management in Microservices: State of the Practice, Challenges, and Research Directions	2021	VLDB	7.5297116e-05
3,880	Controlled Lock Violation	2013	SIGMOD	7.0491452e-05
4,156	Citus: Distributed PostgreSQL for Data-Intensive Applications	2021	SIGMOD	6.86587e-05
5,406	Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly	2022	SIGMOD	6.2289734e-05
5,575	The Principle of Commitment Ordering, or Guaranteeing Serializability in a Heterogeneous Environment of Multiple Autonomous Resource Managers Using Atomic Commitment	1992	VLDB	6.167191e-05
6,034	Taking Omid to the Clouds: Fast, Scalable Transactions for Real-Time Cloud Analytics	2018	VLDB	5.9996668e-05
6,058	Plor: General Transactions with Predictable, Low Tail Latency	2022	SIGMOD	5.9920075e-05
6,509	Scalable Transactions across Heterogeneous NoSQL Key-Value Data Stores	2013	VLDB	5.8572742e-05
7,431	The Concurrency Control Problem in Multidatabases: Characteristics and Solutions	1992	SIGMOD	5.6199783e-05
7,767	Epoxy: ACID Transactions Across Diverse Data Stores	2023	VLDB	5.5485804e-05
8,406	ScalarDB: Universal Transaction Manager for Polystores	2023	VLDB	5.4314245e-05
9,937	Extended Commitment Ordering or Guaranteeing Global Serializability by Applying Commitment Order Selectively to Global Transactions	1993	PODS	5.1955087e-05

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