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The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale

Summary: NAM-DB: scalable distributed transactions over RDMA, with a placement redesign that removes co-partitioning bottlenecks. TPC-C shows scale-out to 6.5M new-orders on 56 nodes, refuting the myth that distributed transactions can't scale. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
h74cb9e2d4702f19b
Venue
VLDB
Year
2017
Pagerank
0.0001097043
Overall Rank
1,339 | 91.01%
DOI
10.14778/3055330.3055331
PDF
Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{zamanian_vldb17,
        title = {{The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale}},
        author = {Zamanian, Erfan and Binnig, Carsten and Harris, Tim and Kraska, Tim},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '17},
        volume = {10},
        number = {6},
        pages = {685--696},
        doi = {10.14778/3055330.3055331},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3055330.3055331},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 46 of 46 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
40 The Case for Learned Index Structures 2018 SIGMOD 0.00046363107
1,343 PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers 2021 SIGMOD 0.00010959797
1,366 Designing Distributed Tree-based Index Structures for Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2019 SIGMOD 0.00010908555
1,408 Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System 2018 VLDB 0.00010738859
1,442 Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service 2020 VLDB 0.00010636513
1,966 Sherman: A Write-Optimized Distributed B+Tree Index on Disaggregated Memory 2022 SIGMOD 9.3014925e-05
3,007 Query Fresh: Log Shipping on Steroids 2018 VLDB 7.7593448e-05
3,271 Rethinking Database High Availability with RDMA Networks 2019 VLDB 7.4716945e-05
3,609 DFI: The Data Flow Interface for High-Speed Networks 2021 SIGMOD 7.1617145e-05
3,678 Fast General Distributed Transactions with Opacity 2019 SIGMOD 7.1030964e-05
3,724 Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP Database Management System 2018 VLDB 7.0679706e-05
3,827 ScaleStore: A Fast and Cost-Efficient Storage Engine using DRAM, NVMe, and RDMA 2022 SIGMOD 6.9972263e-05
3,862 GaccO - A GPU-accelerated OLTP DBMS 2022 SIGMOD 6.9623352e-05
3,973 A1: A Distributed In-Memory Graph Database 2020 SIGMOD 6.8852453e-05
4,173 In-Network Support for Transaction Triaging 2021 VLDB 6.7561241e-05
4,202 The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation 2023 VLDB 6.7343438e-05
4,389 Design Guidelines for Correct, Efficient, and Scalable Synchronization using One-Sided RDMA 2023 SIGMOD 6.6202227e-05
4,416 Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores 2019 VLDB 6.6067888e-05
4,599 G-Tran: A High Performance Distributed Graph Database with a Decentralized Architecture 2022 VLDB 6.5061447e-05
5,186 PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory 2024 SIGMOD 6.2357787e-05
5,320 Chiller: Contention-centric Transaction Execution and Data Partitioning for Modern Networks 2020 SIGMOD 6.1813707e-05
5,376 Distributed GPU Joins on Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2023 SIGMOD 6.1555648e-05
6,274 Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures 2023 CIDR 5.8256214e-05
6,343 Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans 2024 VLDB 5.8064898e-05
6,536 DPI: The Data Processing Interface for Modern Networks 2019 CIDR 5.7514775e-05
6,840 Skeena: Efficient and Consistent Cross-Engine Transactions 2022 SIGMOD 5.6657341e-05
7,023 SepHash: A Write-Optimized Hash Index On Disaggregated Memory via Separate Segment Structure 2024 VLDB 5.6163964e-05
7,179 CoRM: Compactable Remote Memory over RDMA 2021 SIGMOD 5.5908448e-05
7,755 Efficient Distributed Transaction Processing in Heterogeneous Networks 2023 VLDB 5.4572273e-05
7,916 Databases on Modern Networks: A Decade of Research That Now Comes into Practice 2023 VLDB 5.4258309e-05
7,980 Rethinking Stateful Stream Processing with RDMA 2022 SIGMOD 5.4120499e-05
8,162 Pasha: An Efficient, Scalable Database Architecture for CXL Pods 2025 CIDR 5.3854686e-05
8,163 P4DB - The Case for In-Network OLTP 2022 SIGMOD 5.3854685e-05
8,419 Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory 2024 SIGMOD 5.3328741e-05
8,760 Zero-sided RDMA: Network-driven Data Shuffling for Disaggregated Heterogeneous Cloud DBMSs 2024 SIGMOD 5.2822161e-05
9,007 Online Schema Evolution is (Almost) Free for Snapshot Databases 2023 VLDB 5.2375389e-05
9,299 Nezha: An Efficient Distributed Graph Processing System on Heterogeneous Hardware 2025 SIGMOD 5.1987786e-05
9,717 Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases 2025 VLDB 5.1346445e-05
9,849 HiEngine: How to Architect a Cloud-Native Memory-Optimized Database Engine 2022 SIGMOD 5.1201604e-05
9,927 SwitchTx: Scalable In-Network Coordination for Distributed Transaction Processing 2022 VLDB 5.1079647e-05
10,265 From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC 2025 VLDB 5.0480912e-05
10,539 Marlin: Efficient Coordination for Autoscaling Cloud DBMS 2026 SIGMOD 4.9769913e-05
11,231 Dandelion: Smaller Clusters, Bigger Speeds—Distributed Transactions Redefined 2025 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
11,307 Cache Coherence Over Disaggregated Memory 2025 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
11,873 KafkaDirect: Zero-copy Data Access for Apache Kafka over RDMA Networks 2022 SIGMOD 4.9769913e-05
12,072 Rethinking Message Brokers on RDMA and NVM 2020 SIGMOD 4.9769913e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
19 A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels 1995 SIGMOD 0.00058759613
80 H-Store: A High-Performance, Distributed Main Memory Transaction Processing System 2008 VLDB 0.00036354352
123 Schism: a Workload-Driven Approach to Database Replication and Partitioning 2010 VLDB 0.00030749898
473 Skew-Aware Automatic Database Partitioning in Shared-Nothing, Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00017684278
542 FOEDUS: OLTP Engine for a Thousand Cores and NVRAM 2015 SIGMOD 0.00016654017
647 Building a Database on S3 2008 SIGMOD 0.00015201469
756 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00014208768
782 The Case for Determinism in Database Systems 2010 VLDB 0.00014018588
890 Rack-Scale In-Memory Join Processing using RDMA 2015 SIGMOD 0.00013241413
945 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB 0.00012933247
1,060 Accelerating Relational Databases by Leveraging Remote Memory and RDMA 2016 SIGMOD 0.00012219425
1,083 High Performance Transactions in Deuteronomy 2015 CIDR 0.00012109589
1,161 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.0001176315
1,433 Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems 2013 VLDB 0.0001067528
1,447 Consistency Rationing in the Cloud: Pay only when it matters 2009 VLDB 0.00010622872
1,583 On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases 2015 SIGMOD 0.00010165157
1,842 On Predictive Modeling for Optimizing Transaction Execution in Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 VLDB 9.5247433e-05
1,948 Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions 2014 SIGMOD 9.3202419e-05
2,009 PIQL: Success-Tolerant Query Processing in the Cloud 2012 VLDB 9.1949132e-05
2,704 Supporting Table Partitioning By Reference in Oracle 2008 SIGMOD 8.1112208e-05
3,241 Locality-aware Partitioning in Parallel Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 7.4972383e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 933 A Modeling Study of the TPC-C Benchmark 1993 SIGMOD
2 1,366 Designing Distributed Tree-based Index Structures for Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2019 SIGMOD
3 3,271 Rethinking Database High Availability with RDMA Networks 2019 VLDB
4 11,829 Decoupled Transactions: Low Tail Latency Online Transactions Atop Jittery Servers 2022 CIDR
5 945 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB
6 4,416 Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores 2019 VLDB
7 1,945 An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control 2017 VLDB
8 1,948 Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions 2014 SIGMOD
9 1,583 On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases 2015 SIGMOD
10 13,768 Scalable Distributed Transaction Processing on Modern RDMA-enabled Networks 2021 SIGMOD