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Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems

Summary: Proposes very lightweight locking (VLL) for in-memory DBs, replacing traditional lock managers. Paired with selective contention analysis (SCA), VLL sustains high throughput under contention, with experiments showing major locking-overhead reductions in single-machine and shared-nothing deployments. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
h21c75a11e954c328
Venue
VLDB
Year
2013
Pagerank
0.0001064992
Overall Rank
1,437 | 90.37%
DOI
10.14778/2535568.2535569

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{ren_vldb13,
        title = {{Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems}},
        author = {Ren, Kun and Thomson, Alexander and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {2},
        pages = {145--156},
        doi = {10.14778/2535568.2535569},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2535568.2535569},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 28 of 28 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
228 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 0.00023872855
447 Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores 2015 VLDB 0.00018126139
542 FOEDUS: OLTP Engine for a Thousand Cores and NVRAM 2015 SIGMOD 0.00016620527
740 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00014303858
807 Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems 2015 VLDB 0.00013734149
928 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB 0.00013012601
1,158 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.00011744154
1,349 The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale 2017 VLDB 0.00010940559
1,655 Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database 2020 VLDB 9.9502338e-05
1,710 SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions 2019 VLDB 9.797642e-05
2,221 Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention 2016 SIGMOD 8.807697e-05
2,703 An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems 2014 VLDB 8.0952583e-05
3,045 Handling Highly Contended OLTP Workloads Using Fast Dynamic Partitioning 2020 SIGMOD 7.7044181e-05
3,097 Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 7.6354651e-05
3,264 Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution 2016 SIGMOD 7.4667818e-05
3,275 BCC: Reducing False Aborts in Optimistic Concurrency Control with Low Cost for In-Memory Databases 2016 VLDB 7.4557654e-05
3,905 Analyzing the Impact of System Architecture on the Scalability of OLTP Engines for High-Contention Workloads 2018 VLDB 6.9146292e-05
4,081 Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores 2016 SIGMOD 6.801179e-05
4,294 Reducing Database Locking Contention Through Multi-version Concurrency 2014 VLDB 6.6660284e-05
4,395 Graph Analytics Through Fine-Grained Parallelism 2016 SIGMOD 6.6078819e-05
4,450 Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All 2017 CIDR 6.5787041e-05
5,208 PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory 2024 SIGMOD 6.215627e-05
6,331 Scalable Database Logging for Multicores 2018 VLDB 5.7939818e-05
7,588 Database Isolation By Scheduling 2021 VLDB 5.4744469e-05
9,241 Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads? 2025 SIGMOD 5.1865718e-05
10,177 Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates 2021 VLDB 5.055639e-05
11,202 TXSQL: Lock Optimizations Towards High Contented Workloads 2025 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,885 Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch 2022 PODS 4.9605343e-05
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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
54 Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00040489652
70 The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite) 2007 VLDB 0.00037761637
157 OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There 2008 SIGMOD 0.00028244257
172 High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases 2012 VLDB 0.00027021768
262 Data-Oriented Transaction Execution 2010 VLDB 0.00022832269
270 Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications 1985 SIGMOD 0.00022604714
764 The Case for Determinism in Database Systems 2010 VLDB 0.00014110914
1,299 Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance 2009 VLDB 0.00011104379
1,481 Recovery and Coherency-Control Protocols for Fast Intersystem Page Transfer and Fine-Granularity Locking in a Shared Disks Transaction Environment 1991 VLDB 0.00010504836
1,493 Adaptive Locking Strategies in a Multi-node Data Sharing Environment 1991 VLDB 0.00010473146
3,259 Locking and Latching in a Memory-Resident Database System 1992 VLDB 7.4726754e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 4,450 Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All 2017 CIDR
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3 228 Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD
4 2,983 The Performance of Concurrency Control Algorithms for Database Management Systems 1984 VLDB
5 2,338 A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores 2013 SIGMOD
6 1,299 Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance 2009 VLDB
7 2,071 Efficient Optimistic Concurrency Control Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks 1995 SIGMOD
8 6,884 An Almost-Serial Protocol for Transaction Execution in Main-Memory Database Systems 2002 VLDB
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