OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck

Summary: Revisits 2008 OLTP assumptions with whole-stack benchmarks on modern hardware, showing inter-component communication and messaging—not CPU-bound buffer/concurrency work—are now the primary OLTP bottleneck. Analyzes stored-proc vs client-side models and shows stronger UDF isolation raises messaging costs, producing security/multi-tenant tradeoffs and motivating communication-efficient designs. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 542
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 10,631 | 27.07%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Xinjing Zhou (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Viktor Leis (Technical University of Munich)
3. Xiangyao Yu (University of Wisconsin)
4. Michael Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zhou_cidr25,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '25},
        title = {{OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Zhou, Xinjing and Leis, Viktor and Yu, Xiangyao and Stonebraker, Michael},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,581	Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
73	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00037333356
157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.0002863588
604	Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud	2019	SIGMOD	0.0001584774
2,368	What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research	2017	SIGMOD	8.6827828e-05
2,941	Automatic Partitioning of Database Applications	2012	VLDB	7.937125e-05
6,294	Tigger: A Database Proxy That Bounces With User-Bypass	2023	VLDB	5.9239632e-05
6,475	WeBridge: Synthesizing Stored Procedures for Large-Scale Real-World Web Applications	2024	SIGMOD	5.8687157e-05
6,498	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	5.861854e-05
7,024	Yellowbrick: An Elastic Data Warehouse on Kubernetes	2024	CIDR	5.7236842e-05
7,802	Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware	2024	VLDB	5.5418836e-05
9,345	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	5.284891e-05

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