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: h03d79b2aa476f1b9
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 6.4673313e-05
Overall Rank: 4,692 | 68.46%
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 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
508	Adaptive Self-Tuning Memory in DB2	2006	VLDB	0.00017089907
1,539	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00010316015
6,413	External Memory Algorithms	1998	PODS	5.7931958e-05
8,617	Buffering and Read-Ahead Strategies for External Mergesort	1998	VLDB	5.3017239e-05
10,840	CrocSort: Resource-Efficient, Skew-Resilient Parallel External Merge Sort	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-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
223	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.0002412513
1,799	An Adaptive Hash Join Algorithm for Multiuser Environments	1990	VLDB	9.6155018e-05
3,248	Partially Preemptible Hash Joins	1993	SIGMOD	7.4939881e-05
4,144	Memory-Contention Responsive Hash Joins	1994	VLDB	6.7813398e-05
4,469	Memory-Adaptive External Sorting	1993	VLDB	6.5854799e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
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2	12,328	A Study of Sorting Algorithms on Approximate Memory	2016	SIGMOD
3	1,116	A Comprehensive Study of Main-Memory Partitioning and its Application to Large-Scale Comparison- and Radix-Sort	2014	SIGMOD
4	10,840	CrocSort: Resource-Efficient, Skew-Resilient Parallel External Merge Sort	2026	VLDB
5	4,225	SIMD- and Cache-Friendly Algorithm for Sorting an Array of Structures	2015	VLDB
6	1,823	Memory Management during Run Generation in External Sorting	1998	SIGMOD
7	3,672	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD
8	7,854	A Study of Sort Algorithms for Multiprocessor Database Machines	1986	VLDB
9	8,617	Buffering and Read-Ahead Strategies for External Mergesort	1998	VLDB
10	4,469	Memory-Adaptive External Sorting	1993	VLDB