Database Paper Browser

Back to papers

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
288
Venue
CIDR
Year
2017
Pagerank
5.7757413e-05
Overall Rank
4,998 | 65.24%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,373 SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions 2019 VLDB 8.9476269e-05
3,659 Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna 2019 VLDB 6.8696023e-05
6,574 Robust Performance of Main Memory Data Structures by Configuration 2020 SIGMOD 5.0055505e-05
8,049 Contention and Space Management in B-Trees 2021 CIDR 4.5973972e-05
9,454 OptiQL: Robust Optimistic Locking for Memory-Optimized Indexes 2023 SIGMOD 4.3391522e-05
10,583 Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes 2025 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
11,466 Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach 2021 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
11,626 Concurrent Updates to Pages with Fixed-Size Rows Using Lock-Free Algorithms 2020 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

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
86 The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite) 2007 VLDB 0.00052563276
87 Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine 2013 SIGMOD 0.00052389723
122 Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00045316749
190 Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications 1985 SIGMOD 0.0003579699
419 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 0.00023720338
1,036 ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads 2016 SIGMOD 0.0001452166
1,088 ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging 1992 SIGMOD 0.00014161003
1,217 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.0001323177
1,419 Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations 2014 VLDB 0.00012079793
1,521 High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility 2017 VLDB 0.00011532045
1,573 Performance of B-Tree Concurrency Control Algorithms 1991 SIGMOD 0.00011295081
1,692 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.00010901611
2,006 PALM: Parallel Architecture-Friendly Latch-Free Modifications to B+ Trees on Many-Core Processors 2011 VLDB 9.8101551e-05
2,244 Cache-Conscious Concurrency Control of Main-Memory Indexes on Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems 2001 VLDB 9.2097912e-05
2,328 A Case for Staged Database Systems 2003 CIDR 9.0225171e-05
2,713 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD 8.2477916e-05
2,926 Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention 2016 SIGMOD 7.884983e-05
3,605 Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 6.9281695e-05
3,826 To Lock, Swap, or Elide: On the Interplay of Hardware Transactional Memory and Lock-Free Indexing 2015 VLDB 6.7250243e-05
4,469 Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation 2013 SIGMOD 6.1560208e-05
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
3,109 Choice and Performance in Locking for Databases 1984 VLDB 7.5489619e-05
2,741 Locking and Latching in a Memory-Resident Database System 1992 VLDB 8.197051e-05
12,886 Locking without Blocking: Making Lock Based Concurrent Data Structure Algorithms Nonblocking 1992 PODS 4.1945683e-05
606 Concurrency In Database Systems - A Simulation Study 1977 SIGMOD 0.00019328792
1,832 Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems 2013 VLDB 0.00010380187
3,351 An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms 1983 SIGMOD 7.1873372e-05
3,591 A Quantitative Comparison of Lock Protocols for Centralized Databases 1983 VLDB 6.9418919e-05
2,950 The Performance Of Concurrency Control Algorithms For Database Management Systems 1984 VLDB 7.8329866e-05
2,713 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD 8.2477916e-05
4,469 Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation 2013 SIGMOD 6.1560208e-05