Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?

Summary: Microbenchmark-driven analysis of latch-free vs latch-based synchronization in DBMSs, isolating factors (contention, cache-coherence, progress guarantees, failure semantics) that shape performance. Shows latch-free is not a universal win—scalability depends on workload and hardware, leaving latches viable in many cases. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 287
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 6.7773228e-05
Overall Rank: 4,296 | 70.53%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jose M. Faleiro (Yale University)
2. Daniel J. Abadi (Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{faleiro_cidr17,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '17},
        title = {{Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Faleiro, Jose M. and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,775	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.7870611e-05
3,320	Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna	2019	VLDB	7.5223482e-05
6,187	Robust Performance of Main Memory Data Structures by Configuration	2020	SIGMOD	5.9485755e-05
6,396	Contention and Space Management in B-Trees	2021	CIDR	5.8870425e-05
8,474	OptiQL: Robust Optimistic Locking for Memory-Optimized Indexes	2023	SIGMOD	5.4172941e-05
9,547	Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes	2025	VLDB	5.2528121e-05
10,568	Operation-Aware Hybrid Locking for Modern In-Memory Indexes	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,664	Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach	2021	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,821	Concurrent Updates to Pages with Fixed-Size Rows Using Lock-Free Algorithms	2020	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
38	Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine	2013	SIGMOD	0.00047648573
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
233	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023815642
260	Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications	1985	SIGMOD	0.00023103999
655	ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015263509
755	Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control	2015	VLDB	0.00014326008
958	ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging	1992	SIGMOD	0.00012956148
1,063	High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility	2017	VLDB	0.00012343623
1,141	Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores	2017	VLDB	0.0001200422
1,187	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011760199
1,663	Performance of B-Tree Concurrency Control Algorithms	1991	SIGMOD	0.00010073735
1,710	Cache-Conscious Concurrency Control of Main-Memory Indexes on Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems	2001	VLDB	9.9537123e-05
1,822	PALM: Parallel Architecture-Friendly Latch-Free Modifications to B+ Trees on Many-Core Processors	2011	VLDB	9.6765747e-05
2,234	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.8937932e-05
2,309	A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores	2013	SIGMOD	8.7691698e-05
2,394	A Case for Staged Database Systems	2003	CIDR	8.6362653e-05
3,053	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.8098188e-05
3,256	To Lock, Swap, or Elide: On the Interplay of Hardware Transactional Memory and Lock-Free Indexing	2015	VLDB	7.591263e-05
4,064	Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation	2013	SIGMOD	6.9305199e-05

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