What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research

Summary: Questions CC research assuming serializable isolation and stored procedures; a DBA survey shows this isn’t realistic. Advocates reorienting CC to hardware acceleration and AI-driven methods; real-world impact requires constraints beyond clever algorithms. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h498471aecd572d00
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 8.5295579e-05
Overall Rank: 2,394 | 83.91%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3056096

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Andrew Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{pavlo_sigmod17,
        title = {{What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research}},
        author = {Pavlo, Andrew},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3035918.3056096},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3056096},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,573	Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010197084
3,021	Data Management in Microservices: State of the Practice, Challenges, and Research Directions	2021	VLDB	7.7426337e-05
6,180	Plor: General Transactions with Predictable, Low Tail Latency	2022	SIGMOD	5.8595351e-05
6,575	WeBridge: Synthesizing Stored Procedures for Large-Scale Real-World Web Applications	2024	SIGMOD	5.7453775e-05
7,479	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.5137916e-05
7,570	Natto: Providing Distributed Transaction Prioritization for High-Contention Workloads	2022	SIGMOD	5.4944242e-05
7,881	ChronoCache: Predictive and Adaptive Mid-Tier Query Result Caching	2020	SIGMOD	5.4339026e-05
8,742	A Study of Database Performance Sensitivity to Experiment Settings	2022	VLDB	5.2882685e-05
9,277	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2042355e-05
9,727	Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes	2025	VLDB	5.1349531e-05
9,842	HiEngine: How to Architect a Cloud-Native Memory-Optimized Database Engine	2022	SIGMOD	5.1225854e-05
9,946	OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck	2025	CIDR	5.1038322e-05
10,585	PLForge: Enhancing Language Models for Natural Language to Procedural Extensions of SQL	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,378	Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,913	IsoBugView: Interactively Debugging Isolation Bugs in Database Applications	2022	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,973	The Performance of Concurrency Control Algorithms for Database Management Systems	1984	VLDB
2	14,688	A Concurrency Model for Transaction Management	1992	SIGMOD
3	14,687	A Concurrency Model for Transaction Management	1992	SIGMOD
4	12,380	A Multicore Database Is Not a Distributed System	2015	CIDR
5	8,149	Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines	1989	SIGMOD
6	4,265	An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms	1983	SIGMOD
7	445	Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores	2015	VLDB
8	268	Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications	1985	SIGMOD
9	12,379	The Case for Invariant-Based Concurrency Control	2015	CIDR
10	7,479	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR