Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?

Summary: Shows mmap is a risky substitute for a DBMS buffer pool: subtle correctness and performance pathologies cause major systems to abandon it. Provides detailed analysis, experiments, and pragmatic guidance on when mmap might be acceptable. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 441
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 6.0175059e-05
Overall Rank: 5,989 | 58.92%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Andrew Crotty (Carnegie Mellon University)
2. Viktor Leis (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg)
3. Andrew Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{crotty_cidr22,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '22},
        title = {{Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Crotty, Andrew and Leis, Viktor and Pavlo, Andrew},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,001	What Modern NVMe Storage Can Do, And How To Exploit It: High-Performance I/O for High-Performance Storage Engines	2023	VLDB	7.8673493e-05
4,018	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD	6.952278e-05
6,065	Vortex: Overcoming Memory Capacity Limitations in GPU-Accelerated Large-Scale Data Analytics	2025	VLDB	5.9895288e-05
6,456	LSMGraph: A High-Performance Dynamic Graph Storage System with Multi-Level CSR	2024	SIGMOD	5.8741786e-05
6,498	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	5.861854e-05
6,742	Bf-Tree: A Modern Read-Write-Optimized Concurrent Larger-Than-Memory Range Index	2024	VLDB	5.7862414e-05
7,802	Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware	2024	VLDB	5.5418836e-05
8,357	Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory	2024	SIGMOD	5.4446759e-05
8,989	Taking the Shortcut: Actively Incorporating the Virtual Memory Index of the OS to Hardware-Accelerate Database Indexing	2024	CIDR	5.3383769e-05
9,345	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	5.284891e-05
10,482	Predictive Translation: High-Performance Buffer Management Without the Trade-Offs	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
422	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00018732744
669	The TileDB Array Data Storage Manager	2017	VLDB	0.00015163245
821	Dali: A High Performance Main Memory Storage Manager	1994	VLDB	0.00013808096
944	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.00013067088
2,267	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB	8.8388928e-05
2,672	QuickStore: A High Performance Mapped Object Store	1994	SIGMOD	8.2733031e-05
2,828	Exploiting Directly-Attached NVMe Arrays in DBMS	2020	CIDR	8.0803679e-05
3,344	RUMA has it: Rewired User-space Memory Access is Possible!	2016	VLDB	7.4980897e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,096	Global Memory Management in Client-Server DBMS Architectures	1992	VLDB
2	5,495	Efficient Main Memory Data Management Using the DBGraph Storage Model	1990	VLDB
3	1,355	Query Processing in Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	SIGMOD
4	7	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD
5	2,092	Integrating Reliable Memory in Databases	1997	VLDB
6	8,818	Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management	2025	CIDR
7	1,200	Performance of a Data Base Manager in a Virtual Memory System	1976	SIGMOD
8	2,267	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB
9	6,748	The Effect Of Large Main Memory On Database Systems	1986	SIGMOD
10	4,018	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD