On the Power of Locking

Summary: Assesses the expressive power of locking primitives for concurrency control. Gives a necessary-and-sufficient condition to implement a CC principle with binary semaphores and characterizes precisely which lock sets are no more powerful than binary semaphores. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h730a32d875aef98c
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1981
Pagerank: 5.8814174e-05
Overall Rank: 6,117 | 58.88%
DOI: 10.1145/582318.582341

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christos H. Papadimitriou (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{papadimitriou_sigmod81,
        title = {{On the Power of Locking}},
        author = {Papadimitriou, Christos H.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '81},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/582318.582341},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/582318.582341},
        year = {1981}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
528	On Concurrency Control by Multiple Versions	1982	PODS	0.00016873875
2,112	Basic Timestamp, Multiple Version Timestamp, and Two-Phase Locking	1983	VLDB	9.0206895e-05
4,891	Is Distributed Locking Harder?	1982	PODS	6.3680327e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
711	An Optimality Theory of Concurrency Control for Databases	1979	SIGMOD	0.00014608112

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	14,327	Process Locking: A Protocol based on Ordered Shared Locks for the Execution of Transactional Processes	2001	PODS
2	4,319	Experimental Evaluation of Real-Time Optimistic Concurrency Control Schemes	1991	VLDB
3	4,265	An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms	1983	SIGMOD
4	7,399	Compatibility And Commutativity In Non-Two-Phase Locking Protocols	1982	PODS
5	14,789	Concurrency Control in Graph Protocols by Using Edge Locks	1984	PODS
6	14,761	Safety Of Non-Well-Locked Transaction Systems	1986	PODS
7	3,852	Extracting Concurrency from Objects: A Methodology	1991	SIGMOD
8	2,856	Hybrid Concurrency Control for Abstract Data Types (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS
9	14,788	Maximal Concurrency By Locking	1984	PODS
10	5,821	Locks with Constrained Sharing (Extended Abstract)	1990	PODS