CXL and the Return of Scale-Up Database Engines

Summary: Argues CXL turns a rack into a shared-memory machine, enabling scale-up DB engines via transparent pooling of memory and accelerators beyond PCIe limits. Outlines benefits for heterogeneous data systems and key research challenges (resource mgmt, coherence, performance, SW/HW co-design). (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h3a70c695fa4d848a
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 6.3442191e-05
Overall Rank: 4,943 | 66.77%
DOI: 10.14778/3675034.3675047

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alberto Lerner (University of Freiburg)
2. Gustavo Alonso (ETH Zurich)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lerner_vldb24,
        title = {{CXL and the Return of Scale-Up Database Engines}},
        author = {Lerner, Alberto and Alonso, Gustavo},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '24},
        volume = {17},
        number = {10},
        pages = {2568--2575},
        doi = {10.14778/3675034.3675047},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3675034.3675047},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,321	An Examination of CXL Memory Use Cases for In-Memory Database Management Systems using SAP HANA	2024	VLDB	5.5534395e-05
7,945	Unlocking the Potential of CXL for Disaggregated Memory in Cloud-Native Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.4212704e-05
8,156	Pasha: An Efficient, Scalable Database Architecture for CXL Pods	2025	CIDR	5.3880193e-05
8,746	CXL Memory Performance for In-Memory Data Processing	2025	VLDB	5.287784e-05
9,792	Hash Joins Meet CXL: A Fresh Look	2026	CIDR	5.1257999e-05
10,074	Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing	2025	CIDR	5.0855548e-05
10,439	Discovery of Denial Constraints with Hardware Acceleration	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
10,727	SIDLE: Tree-structure Aware Indexes for CXL-based Heterogeneous Memory	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.0005158963
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038531147
128	An Evaluation of Buffer Management Strategies for Relational Database Systems	1985	VLDB	0.00030411805
771	The Yin and Yang of Processing Data Warehousing Queries on GPU Devices	2013	VLDB	0.00014085862
945	The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign	2016	VLDB	0.00012939225
1,425	Amazon Aurora: On Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, and Membership Changes	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010714536
1,790	POLARIS: The Distributed SQL Engine in Azure Synapse	2020	VLDB	9.6272006e-05
2,284	Pump Up the Volume: Processing Large Data on GPUs with Fast Interconnects	2020	SIGMOD	8.6954168e-05
3,227	Farview: Disaggregated Memory with Operator Off-loading for Database Engines	2022	CIDR	7.5083649e-05
3,270	Rethinking Database High Availability with RDMA Networks	2019	VLDB	7.475162e-05
4,201	The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation	2023	VLDB	6.7375318e-05
4,296	Redy: Remote Dynamic Memory Cache	2022	VLDB	6.6805238e-05
4,414	Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores	2019	VLDB	6.609914e-05
4,573	Accelerating Raw Data Analysis with the ACCORDA Software and Hardware Architecture	2019	VLDB	6.5265033e-05
4,899	Micro-architectural Analysis of In-memory OLTP	2016	SIGMOD	6.3655167e-05
6,294	Database Kernels: Seamless Integration of Database Systems and Fast Storage via CXL	2024	CIDR	5.8213142e-05
7,209	Hardware Acceleration of Compression and Encryption in SAP HANA	2022	VLDB	5.5845533e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,028	High-Speed Query Processing over High-Speed Networks	2016	VLDB
2	6,516	GPU-accelerated data management under the test of time	2020	CIDR
3	12,440	Databases and Hardware: The Beginning and Sequel of a Beautiful Friendship	2015	VLDB
4	10,074	Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing	2025	CIDR
5	8,274	Scaling GPU-Accelerated Databases beyond GPU Memory Size	2025	VLDB
6	6,294	Database Kernels: Seamless Integration of Database Systems and Fast Storage via CXL	2024	CIDR
7	5,991	Terabyte-Scale Analytics in the Blink of an Eye	2026	VLDB
8	9,792	Hash Joins Meet CXL: A Fresh Look	2026	CIDR
9	2,284	Pump Up the Volume: Processing Large Data on GPUs with Fast Interconnects	2020	SIGMOD
10	8,746	CXL Memory Performance for In-Memory Data Processing	2025	VLDB