Dynamic Memory Adjustment for External Mergesort

Summary: Dynamic memory adjustment for external mergesort enables run-time tuning of in-memory space to adapt to unknown input size. A concurrent-sorts memory-allocation policy improves throughput and latency under contention by limiting parallelism. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 8629
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 6.4297637e-05
Overall Rank: 4,955 | 66.01%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Weiye Zhang (University of Waterloo)
2. Per-Ake Larson (Microsoft)

BibTeX Citation

@article{zhang_vldb97,
        title = {{Dynamic Memory Adjustment for External Mergesort}},
        author = {Zhang, Weiye and Larson, Per-Ake},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '97},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
523	Adaptive Self-Tuning Memory in DB2	2006	VLDB	0.00017133451
1,508	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00010540965
6,289	External Memory Algorithms	1998	PODS	5.9261616e-05
8,451	Buffering and Read-Ahead Strategies for External Mergesort	1998	VLDB	5.4230411e-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
215	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.00024507963
1,779	An Adaptive Hash Join Algorithm for Multiuser Environments	1990	VLDB	9.7764427e-05
3,223	Partially Preemptible Hash Joins	1993	SIGMOD	7.6256187e-05
4,104	Memory-Contention Responsive Hash Joins	1994	VLDB	6.8987972e-05
4,708	Memory-Adaptive External Sorting	1993	VLDB	6.5519325e-05

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6	1,801	Memory Management during Run Generation in External Sorting	1998	SIGMOD
7	3,842	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD
8	7,705	A Study of Sort Algorithms for Multiprocessor Database Machines	1986	VLDB
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