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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
5.9280553e-05
Overall Rank
4,773 | 66.83%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,358 SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions 2019 VLDB 8.9675888e-05
3,645 Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna 2019 VLDB 6.882432e-05
6,566 Robust Performance of Main Memory Data Structures by Configuration 2020 SIGMOD 5.0030559e-05
8,032 Contention and Space Management in B-Trees 2021 CIDR 4.5983032e-05
8,595 OptiQL: Robust Optimistic Locking for Memory-Optimized Indexes 2023 SIGMOD 4.4844188e-05
9,401 Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes 2025 VLDB 4.3399748e-05
10,281 Operation-Aware Hybrid Locking for Modern In-Memory Indexes 2026 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,469 Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,630 Concurrent Updates to Pages with Fixed-Size Rows Using Lock-Free Algorithms 2020 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
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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
87 Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine 2013 SIGMOD 0.00052844656
88 The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite) 2007 VLDB 0.0005262025
122 Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.0004532783
190 Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications 1985 SIGMOD 0.00035797633
419 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 0.00023720294
1,036 ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads 2016 SIGMOD 0.00014515226
1,087 ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging 1992 SIGMOD 0.00014159274
1,217 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00013228757
1,418 Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations 2014 VLDB 0.00012082141
1,521 High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility 2017 VLDB 0.00011522701
1,573 Performance of B-Tree Concurrency Control Algorithms 1991 SIGMOD 0.00011293832
1,637 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.00011058532
1,999 PALM: Parallel Architecture-Friendly Latch-Free Modifications to B+ Trees on Many-Core Processors 2011 VLDB 9.8287642e-05
2,233 Cache-Conscious Concurrency Control of Main-Memory Indexes on Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems 2001 VLDB 9.2299873e-05
2,329 A Case for Staged Database Systems 2003 CIDR 9.0237899e-05
2,712 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD 8.2530512e-05
2,926 Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention 2016 SIGMOD 7.8868401e-05
3,605 Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 6.9247155e-05
3,630 To Lock, Swap, or Elide: On the Interplay of Hardware Transactional Memory and Lock-Free Indexing 2015 VLDB 6.8989362e-05
4,458 Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation 2013 SIGMOD 6.1617961e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
3,112 Choice and Performance in Locking for Databases 1984 VLDB 7.5444888e-05
2,742 Locking and Latching in a Memory-Resident Database System 1992 VLDB 8.1946686e-05
12,896 Locking without Blocking: Making Lock Based Concurrent Data Structure Algorithms Nonblocking 1992 PODS 4.1905499e-05
605 Concurrency In Database Systems - A Simulation Study 1977 SIGMOD 0.000193138
1,827 Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems 2013 VLDB 0.00010389522
3,354 An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms 1983 SIGMOD 7.1812114e-05
3,593 A Quantitative Comparison of Lock Protocols for Centralized Databases 1983 VLDB 6.9359423e-05
2,950 The Performance Of Concurrency Control Algorithms For Database Management Systems 1984 VLDB 7.8274188e-05
2,712 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD 8.2530512e-05
4,458 Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation 2013 SIGMOD 6.1617961e-05