Database Buffer Size Investigation for OLTP Workloads

Summary: Empirical study on real-world OLTP databases shows how buffer size, database size, and CPU count affect throughput and buffer hits on SMP systems. Offers predictive models and rules-of-thumb for memory sizing vs. CPU scaling in OLTP workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3001
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 7.0826614e-05
Overall Rank: 3,837 | 73.68%
DOI: 10.1145/253260.253279

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Thin-Fong Tsuei (Sun Microsystems)
2. Allan N. Packer (Sun Microsystems)
3. Keng-Tai Ko (Sun Microsystems)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tsuei_sigmod97,
        title = {{Database Buffer Size Investigation for OLTP Workloads}},
        author = {Tsuei, Thin-Fong and Packer, Allan N. and Ko, Keng-Tai},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '97},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/253260.253279},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/253260.253279},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
794	Bitmap Index Design and Evaluation	1998	SIGMOD	0.00013969303
5,504	Flash-Based Extended Cache for Higher Throughput and Faster Recovery	2012	VLDB	6.1946862e-05
8,710	Avoiding Read Stalls on Flash Storage	2022	SIGMOD	5.378796e-05
9,775	Twisted Twin: A Collaborative and Competitive Memory Management Approach in HTAP Systems	2025	VLDB	5.2209769e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
135	An Evaluation of Buffer Management Strategies for Relational Database Systems	1985	VLDB	0.00030209257
914	A Modeling Study of the TPC-C Benchmark	1993	SIGMOD	0.00013246456

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	29	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB
2	13,405	Micro-architectural Analysis of OLAP Systems on Persistent Memory	2022	CIDR
3	109	DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?	1999	VLDB
4	914	A Modeling Study of the TPC-C Benchmark	1993	SIGMOD
5	11,981	The Next 700 Transaction Processing Engines	2017	SIGMOD
6	4,197	Buffer Pool Aware Query Optimization	2005	CIDR
7	1,964	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB
8	2,267	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB
9	4,866	Micro-architectural Analysis of In-memory OLTP	2016	SIGMOD
10	157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD