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: 442
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.1692825e-05
Overall Rank: 6,177 | 57.03%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,736	What Modern NVMe Storage Can Do, And How To Exploit It: High-Performance I/O for High-Performance Storage Engines	2023	VLDB	6.8057888e-05
4,583	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD	6.0676378e-05
6,453	Vortex: Overcoming Memory Capacity Limitations in GPU-Accelerated Large-Scale Data Analytics	2025	VLDB	5.0571108e-05
6,840	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	4.9109345e-05
7,154	Bf-Tree: A Modern Read-Write-Optimized Concurrent Larger-Than-Memory Range Index	2024	VLDB	4.815267e-05
7,694	LSMGraph: A High-Performance Dynamic Graph Storage System with Multi-Level CSR	2024	SIGMOD	4.6757592e-05
7,927	Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware	2024	VLDB	4.6136219e-05
8,428	Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory	2024	SIGMOD	4.5158105e-05
9,010	Taking the Shortcut: Actively Incorporating the Virtual Memory Index of the OS to Hardware-Accelerate Database Indexing	2024	CIDR	4.4100932e-05
9,185	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	4.3792034e-05
10,193	Predictive Translation: High-Performance Buffer Management Without the Trade-Offs	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-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
510	Dali: A High Performance Main Memory Storage Manager	1994	VLDB	0.00021390381
734	The TileDB Array Data Storage Manager	2017	VLDB	0.00017455248
735	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00017452467
1,213	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.0001325231
2,416	QuickStore: A High Performance Mapped Object Store	1994	SIGMOD	8.8606683e-05
2,964	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB	7.80643e-05
3,687	Exploiting Directly-Attached NVMe Arrays in DBMS	2020	CIDR	6.8417266e-05
3,933	RUMA has it: Rewired User-space Memory Access is Possible!	2016	VLDB	6.617914e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,085	Global Memory Management in Client-Server DBMS Architectures	1992	VLDB	5.7089113e-05
5,004	Efficient Main Memory Data Management Using the DBGraph Storage Model	1990	VLDB	5.76478e-05
1,309	Query Processing in Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	SIGMOD	0.00012660929
1,969	Integrating Reliable Memory in Databases	1997	VLDB	9.903524e-05
9	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD	0.0014279444
8,798	Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management	2025	CIDR	4.4489415e-05
573	Performance of a Data Base Manager in a Virtual Memory System	1976	SIGMOD	0.00019883716
2,964	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB	7.80643e-05
5,677	The Effect Of Large Main Memory On Database Systems	1986	SIGMOD	5.3759223e-05
4,583	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD	6.0676378e-05