Database Isolation By Scheduling

Summary: DIBS modularizes isolation with predicate locking, decoupling it from the storage manager to enable a disaggregated data stack. As sole isolation mechanism, it scales to 10.5M TPS on TATP, reduces SQLite writes by 90%, and yields 1.4× YCSB on MySQL. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h0b2a55d783459337
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.4924612e-05
Overall Rank: 7,573 | 49.11%
DOI: 10.14778/3461535.3461537
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Kevin P. Gaffney (University of Wisconsin)
2. Robert Claus (DataChat Inc.)
3. Jignesh M. Patel (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{gaffney_vldb21,
        title = {{Database Isolation By Scheduling}},
        author = {Gaffney, Kevin P. and Claus, Robert and Patel, Jignesh M.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {9},
        pages = {1467--1480},
        doi = {10.14778/3461535.3461537},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3461535.3461537},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,484	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.5122541e-05
9,286	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2017718e-05
11,296	Concurrency Control as a Service	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0023943337
35	Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine	2013	SIGMOD	0.00047996489
55	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040454492
170	High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases	2012	VLDB	0.00027054001
235	OLTP-Bench: An Extensible Testbed for Benchmarking Relational Databases	2014	VLDB	0.00023689995
756	Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control	2015	VLDB	0.00014208768
786	Cicada: Dependably Fast Multi-Core In-Memory Transactions	2017	SIGMOD	0.00013983316
864	Let’s Talk About Storage & Recovery Methods for Non-Volatile Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00013388481
993	Unbundling Transaction Services in the Cloud	2009	CIDR	0.00012633413
1,083	High Performance Transactions in Deuteronomy	2015	CIDR	0.00012109589
1,102	Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations	2021	VLDB	0.00011999358
1,433	Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems	2013	VLDB	0.0001067528
2,381	NVRAM-aware Logging in Transaction Systems	2015	VLDB	8.5459988e-05
2,599	Locking Key Ranges with Unbundled Transaction Services	2009	VLDB	8.2361319e-05
2,997	Instant Recovery for Main-Memory Databases	2015	CIDR	7.7669205e-05
3,858	Multi-Version Range Concurrency Control in Deuteronomy	2015	VLDB	6.9658872e-05
4,078	DBSeer: Resource and Performance Prediction for Building a Next Generation Database Cloud	2013	CIDR	6.8154962e-05
4,437	Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All	2017	CIDR	6.5976634e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	11,299	Using Read Promotion and Mixed Isolation Levels for Performant Yet Serializable Execution of Transaction Programs	2025	VLDB
2	1,948	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD
3	11,344	Shifting Transaction Isolation on Graphs: From Systems to Data	2025	VLDB
4	9,614	TxnSails: Achieving Serializable Transaction Scheduling with Self-Adaptive Isolation Level Selection	2025	VLDB
5	11,693	Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions in a Multiversion Setting	2023	PODS
6	6,871	An Almost-Serial Protocol for Transaction Execution in Main-Memory Database Systems	2002	VLDB
7	2,703	Scheduling Real-Time Transactions with Disk Resident Data	1989	VLDB
8	237	Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases	2008	SIGMOD
9	2,691	Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions	2005	PODS
10	6,481	Contention-Aware Lock Scheduling for Transactional Databases	2018	VLDB