Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?

Summary: Shows mmap is a risky substitute for a DBMS buffer pool: subtle correctness and performance pathologies cause major systems to abandon it. Provides detailed analysis, experiments, and pragmatic guidance on when mmap might be acceptable. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h548c0e7ef10f3cc8
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 6.2452792e-05
Overall Rank: 5,161 | 65.32%
DOI: -
PDF: Download (CC BY 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Andrew Crotty (Carnegie Mellon University)
2. Viktor Leis (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg)
3. Andrew Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{crotty_cidr22,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '22},
        title = {{Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Crotty, Andrew and Leis, Viktor and Pavlo, Andrew},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,921	What Modern NVMe Storage Can Do, And How To Exploit It: High-Performance I/O for High-Performance Storage Engines	2023	VLDB	7.8503064e-05
4,094	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD	6.8094958e-05
5,221	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	6.2207378e-05
5,543	Vortex: Overcoming Memory Capacity Limitations in GPU-Accelerated Large-Scale Data Analytics	2025	VLDB	6.0873423e-05
6,121	LSMGraph: A High-Performance Dynamic Graph Storage System with Multi-Level CSR	2024	SIGMOD	5.8779092e-05
6,486	Bf-Tree: A Modern Read-Write-Optimized Concurrent Larger-Than-Memory Range Index	2024	VLDB	5.766886e-05
7,963	Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware	2024	VLDB	5.414974e-05
8,419	Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory	2024	SIGMOD	5.3328741e-05
8,579	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	5.3102486e-05
9,141	Taking the Shortcut: Actively Incorporating the Virtual Memory Index of the OS to Hardware-Accelerate Database Indexing	2024	CIDR	5.220702e-05
10,680	Predictive Translation: High-Performance Buffer Management Without the Trade-Offs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,890	One Pass to Parse Them All: Fused Parallel CSV Processing	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
373	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019705706
673	The TileDB Array Data Storage Manager	2017	VLDB	0.00014891415
820	Dali: A High Performance Main Memory Storage Manager	1994	VLDB	0.00013658052
954	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.00012866296
2,291	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB	8.6855592e-05
2,693	QuickStore: A High Performance Mapped Object Store	1994	SIGMOD	8.119791e-05
2,875	Exploiting Directly-Attached NVMe Arrays in DBMS	2020	CIDR	7.916817e-05
3,358	RUMA has it: Rewired User-space Memory Access is Possible!	2016	VLDB	7.377868e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,204	Global Memory Management in Client-Server DBMS Architectures	1992	VLDB
2	5,585	Efficient Main Memory Data Management Using the DBGraph Storage Model	1990	VLDB
3	1,384	Query Processing in Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	SIGMOD
4	7	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD
5	2,131	Integrating Reliable Memory in Databases	1997	VLDB
6	8,994	Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management	2025	CIDR
7	1,202	Performance of a Data Base Manager in a Virtual Memory System	1976	SIGMOD
8	2,291	In-Memory Performance for Big Data	2015	VLDB
9	6,893	The Effect Of Large Main Memory On Database Systems	1986	SIGMOD
10	4,094	Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management	2023	SIGMOD