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A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels

Summary: ANSI SQL-92 isolation levels critiqued: phenomena-based criteria and locking semantics mischaracterize common levels. Investigates ambiguity, formalizes phenomena, introduces new ones, and defines Snapshot Isolation as a central multiversion isolation type. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
2784
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
1995
Pagerank
0.00083899338
Overall Rank
23 | 99.85%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 134 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
20 C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS 2005 VLDB 0.00086163998
156 Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases 2017 SIGMOD 0.00040580118
176 The Dangers of Replication and a Solution 1996 SIGMOD 0.0003818552
286 High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases 2012 VLDB 0.0002894802
348 Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases 2008 SIGMOD 0.00026473778
419 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 0.00023720294
492 A Case for Flash Memory SSD in Enterprise Database Applications 2008 SIGMOD 0.0002178745
591 Lazy Database Replication with Snapshot Isolation 2006 VLDB 0.00019545141
715 Building a Database on S3 2008 SIGMOD 0.00017636409
887 Zephyr: Live Migration in Shared Nothing Databases for Elastic Cloud Platforms 2011 SIGMOD 0.00015561082
900 F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales 2013 VLDB 0.00015466804
914 Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud 2019 SIGMOD 0.00015370799
956 Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL 2012 VLDB 0.00015068342
1,036 ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads 2016 SIGMOD 0.00014515226
1,050 A Common Database Approach for OLTP and OLAP Using an In-Memory Column Database 2009 SIGMOD 0.00014425459
1,130 Unbundling Transaction Services in the Cloud 2009 CIDR 0.00013767385
1,217 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00013228757
1,273 Amazon Redshift Re-invented 2022 SIGMOD 0.00012870386
1,418 Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations 2014 VLDB 0.00012082141
1,424 LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans 2020 VLDB 0.00012044472
1,431 An Empirical Evaluation of In-Memory Multi-Version Concurrency Control 2017 VLDB 0.00012021808
1,439 Consistency Rationing in the Cloud: Pay only when it matters 2009 VLDB 0.00011956201
1,521 High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility 2017 VLDB 0.00011522701
1,600 Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps Between Theory and Practice 2008 SIGMOD 0.00011198173
1,634 Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service 2020 VLDB 0.00011061792
1,637 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.00011058532
1,684 Fast Iterative Graph Computation with Block Updates 2013 VLDB 0.00010912102
1,745 On-Line Warehouse View Maintenance 1997 SIGMOD 0.0001069303
1,748 Middleware based Data Replication providing Snapshot Isolation 2005 SIGMOD 0.00010686096
1,813 The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale 2017 VLDB 0.00010452333
1,949 Positional Update Handling in Column Stores 2010 SIGMOD 9.9934641e-05
1,956 On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases 2015 SIGMOD 9.9626473e-05
1,979 Blockchain Meets Database: Design and Implementation of a Blockchain Relational Database 2019 VLDB 9.8749371e-05
1,985 ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications 2017 SIGMOD 9.8619045e-05
2,026 Lazy Maintenance of Materialized Views 2007 VLDB 9.7466372e-05
2,132 Automating the Detection of Snapshot Isolation Anomalies 2007 VLDB 9.47431e-05
2,294 Veritas: Shared Verifiable Databases and Tables in the Cloud 2019 CIDR 9.0859765e-05
2,363 An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse 2006 VLDB 8.9594816e-05
2,372 Predictable Performance for Unpredictable Workloads 2009 VLDB 8.940791e-05
2,431 Decibel: The Relational Dataset Branching System 2016 VLDB 8.8259664e-05
2,535 A Transactional Perspective on Execute-order-validate Blockchains 2020 SIGMOD 8.5817279e-05
2,653 Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions 2005 PODS 8.3657356e-05
2,691 LogBase: A Scalable Log-structured Database System in the Cloud 2012 VLDB 8.2904613e-05
2,820 Low-Latency Multi-Datacenter Databases using Replicated Commit 2013 VLDB 8.0655916e-05
2,882 TurboFlux: A Fast Continuous Subgraph Matching System for Streaming Graph Data 2018 SIGMOD 7.9666138e-05
3,070 HAWQ: A Massively Parallel Processing SQL Engine in Hadoop 2014 SIGMOD 7.6157391e-05
3,141 Transaction Time Indexing with Version Compression 2008 VLDB 7.4910063e-05
3,482 Optimal Column Layout for Hybrid Workloads 2019 VLDB 7.0514808e-05
3,858 Bit-Sliced Index Arithmetic 2001 SIGMOD 6.6893766e-05
4,043 TARDiS: A Branch-and-Merge Approach To Weak Consistency 2016 SIGMOD 6.5034165e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
26 The Design Of The Postgres Storage System 1987 VLDB 0.00082350905
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