Memory-Adaptive External Sorting

Summary: Memory-adaptive external sorting reduces buffer usage when memory is constrained and exploits extra buffers when available. Extends to memory-aware sort-merge joins; experiments show gains for sorting and joining large relations under memory fluctuations. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 8351
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1993
Pagerank: 6.5519325e-05
Overall Rank: 4,708 | 67.70%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. HweeHwa Pang (University of Wisconsin)
2. Michael J. Carey (University of Wisconsin)
3. Miron Livny (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{pang_vldb93,
        title = {{Memory-Adaptive External Sorting}},
        author = {Pang, HweeHwa and Carey, Michael J. and Livny, Miron},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '93},
        pages = {618},
        year = {1993}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,508	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00010540965
4,462	Dynamic Resource Brokering for Multi-User Query Execution	1995	SIGMOD	6.6883778e-05
4,955	Dynamic Memory Adjustment for External Mergesort	1997	VLDB	6.4297637e-05
6,289	External Memory Algorithms	1998	PODS	5.9261616e-05
7,271	Managing Memory For Real-Time Queries	1994	SIGMOD	5.6595838e-05
8,818	Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management	2025	CIDR	5.3637177e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
270	Disk Shadowing	1988	VLDB	0.00022768303
1,779	An Adaptive Hash Join Algorithm for Multiuser Environments	1990	VLDB	9.7764427e-05
2,184	Managing Memory to Meet Multiclass Workload Response Time Goals	1993	VLDB	9.0045033e-05
3,223	Partially Preemptible Hash Joins	1993	SIGMOD	7.6256187e-05
3,842	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD	7.0803078e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,177	A Comprehensive Study of Main-Memory Partitioning and its Application to Large-Scale Comparison- and Radix-Sort	2014	SIGMOD
2	7	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD
3	1,508	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR
4	8,451	Buffering and Read-Ahead Strategies for External Mergesort	1998	VLDB
5	423	Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems	2012	VLDB
6	12,033	A Study of Sorting Algorithms on Approximate Memory	2016	SIGMOD
7	1,355	Query Processing in Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	SIGMOD
8	7,705	A Study of Sort Algorithms for Multiprocessor Database Machines	1986	VLDB
9	1,996	Write-limited sorts and joins for persistent memory	2014	VLDB
10	4,955	Dynamic Memory Adjustment for External Mergesort	1997	VLDB