Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware

Summary: Cloud and DBaaS make DBMS-specific unikernels practical: single-address-space kernels cut syscall/process-isolation overhead and permit direct hardware access for high-performance cloud-native databases. Advocates abandoning POSIX constraints to co-design new DB–OS abstractions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h3199075424c881eb
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.3971087e-05
Overall Rank: 7,980 | 46.51%
DOI: 10.14778/3659437.3659462
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Viktor Leis (Technical University of Munich)
2. Christian Dietrich (Technische Universität Braunschweig)

BibTeX Citation

@article{leis_vldb24,
        title = {{Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware}},
        author = {Leis, Viktor and Dietrich, Christian},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '24},
        volume = {17},
        number = {8},
        pages = {2115--2122},
        doi = {10.14778/3659437.3659462},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3659437.3659462},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,225	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	6.2100105e-05
8,596	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	5.2926896e-05
9,024	Low-Latency Transaction Scheduling via Userspace Interrupts: Why Wait or Yield When You Can Preempt?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2209552e-05
9,051	BPF-DB: A Kernel-Embedded Transactional Database Management System For eBPF Applications	2025	SIGMOD	5.2152045e-05
9,948	High-Performance DBMSs with io_uring: When and How to Use It	2026	VLDB	5.0910746e-05
9,987	OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck	2025	CIDR	5.0845476e-05
10,936	Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,186	Rapid Data Ingestion through DB-OS Co-design	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
52	The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse	2016	SIGMOD	0.00041439488
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024554257
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023872855
375	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019660459
2,881	Exploiting Directly-Attached NVMe Arrays in DBMS	2020	CIDR	7.8945474e-05
2,934	What Modern NVMe Storage Can Do, And How To Exploit It: High-Performance I/O for High-Performance Storage Engines	2023	VLDB	7.8265774e-05
3,364	RUMA has it: Rewired User-space Memory Access is Possible!	2016	VLDB	7.3560582e-05
3,476	DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System	2022	VLDB	7.2552418e-05
4,058	Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics	2023	VLDB	6.8134824e-05
4,089	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD	6.7968217e-05
4,782	Accelerating Analytical Processing in MVCC using Fine-Granular High-Frequency Virtual Snapshotting	2018	SIGMOD	6.4059564e-05
5,180	Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?	2022	CIDR	6.2257186e-05
6,271	COD: Database / Operating System Co-Design	2013	CIDR	5.8114373e-05
7,746	A Progress Report on DBOS: A Database-oriented Operating System	2022	CIDR	5.4456907e-05

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6	9,561	OSDB: Exposing the Operating System's Inner Database	2025	CIDR
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