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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
0.00010940559
Overall Rank
1,349 | 90.96%
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 0.00046249672
1,315 PolarDB Serverless: A Cloud Native Database for Disaggregated Data Centers 2021 SIGMOD 0.00011047549
1,370 Designing Distributed Tree-based Index Structures for Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2019 SIGMOD 0.00010875068
1,416 Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System 2018 VLDB 0.00010707248
1,448 Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service 2020 VLDB 0.00010601724
1,974 Sherman: A Write-Optimized Distributed B+Tree Index on Disaggregated Memory 2022 SIGMOD 9.2725837e-05
3,011 Query Fresh: Log Shipping on Steroids 2018 VLDB 7.7421635e-05
3,173 Rethinking Database High Availability with RDMA Networks 2019 VLDB 7.5552708e-05
3,616 DFI: The Data Flow Interface for High-Speed Networks 2021 SIGMOD 7.1381983e-05
3,686 Fast General Distributed Transactions with Opacity 2019 SIGMOD 7.0805751e-05
3,729 Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP Database Management System 2018 VLDB 7.0449074e-05
3,816 ScaleStore: A Fast and Cost-Efficient Storage Engine using DRAM, NVMe, and RDMA 2022 SIGMOD 6.9852219e-05
3,868 GaccO - A GPU-accelerated OLTP DBMS 2022 SIGMOD 6.9436655e-05
3,976 A1: A Distributed In-Memory Graph Database 2020 SIGMOD 6.872794e-05
4,044 The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation 2023 VLDB 6.820171e-05
4,192 In-Network Support for Transaction Triaging 2021 VLDB 6.7342449e-05
4,412 Design Guidelines for Correct, Efficient, and Scalable Synchronization using One-Sided RDMA 2023 SIGMOD 6.5988566e-05
4,431 Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores 2019 VLDB 6.5871432e-05
4,617 G-Tran: A High Performance Distributed Graph Database with a Decentralized Architecture 2022 VLDB 6.4848168e-05
5,208 PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory 2024 SIGMOD 6.215627e-05
5,337 Chiller: Contention-centric Transaction Execution and Data Partitioning for Modern Networks 2020 SIGMOD 6.1613626e-05
5,373 Distributed GPU Joins on Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2023 SIGMOD 6.1405913e-05
6,288 Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures 2023 CIDR 5.8063583e-05
6,353 Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans 2024 VLDB 5.78729e-05
6,547 DPI: The Data Processing Interface for Modern Networks 2019 CIDR 5.7326481e-05
6,848 Skeena: Efficient and Consistent Cross-Engine Transactions 2022 SIGMOD 5.6495967e-05
7,044 SepHash: A Write-Optimized Hash Index On Disaggregated Memory via Separate Segment Structure 2024 VLDB 5.5978251e-05
7,191 CoRM: Compactable Remote Memory over RDMA 2021 SIGMOD 5.5736866e-05
7,770 Efficient Distributed Transaction Processing in Heterogeneous Networks 2023 VLDB 5.4391823e-05
7,930 Databases on Modern Networks: A Decade of Research That Now Comes into Practice 2023 VLDB 5.4078897e-05
7,996 Rethinking Stateful Stream Processing with RDMA 2022 SIGMOD 5.3941543e-05
8,179 P4DB - The Case for In-Network OLTP 2022 SIGMOD 5.3676622e-05
8,180 Pasha: An Efficient, Scalable Database Architecture for CXL Pods 2025 CIDR 5.3676609e-05
8,437 Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory 2024 SIGMOD 5.315377e-05
8,781 Zero-sided RDMA: Network-driven Data Shuffling for Disaggregated Heterogeneous Cloud DBMSs 2024 SIGMOD 5.2647498e-05
9,026 Online Schema Evolution is (Almost) Free for Snapshot Databases 2023 VLDB 5.2202203e-05
9,322 Nezha: An Efficient Distributed Graph Processing System on Heterogeneous Hardware 2025 SIGMOD 5.1815882e-05
9,748 Chimera: Mitigating Ownership Transfers in Multi-Primary Shared-Storage Cloud-Native Databases 2025 VLDB 5.1176662e-05
9,886 HiEngine: How to Architect a Cloud-Native Memory-Optimized Database Engine 2022 SIGMOD 5.10323e-05
9,962 SwitchTx: Scalable In-Network Coordination for Distributed Transaction Processing 2022 VLDB 5.0910746e-05
10,293 From Scale-Up to Scale-Out: PolarDB’s Journey to Achieving 2 Billion tpmC 2025 VLDB 5.031399e-05
10,605 Marlin: Efficient Coordination for Autoscaling Cloud DBMS 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,287 Dandelion: Smaller Clusters, Bigger Speeds—Distributed Transactions Redefined 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,361 Cache Coherence Over Disaggregated Memory 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,917 KafkaDirect: Zero-copy Data Access for Apache Kafka over RDMA Networks 2022 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
12,116 Rethinking Message Brokers on RDMA and NVM 2020 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-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 0.00058631912
80 H-Store: A High-Performance, Distributed Main Memory Transaction Processing System 2008 VLDB 0.00036267455
122 Schism: a Workload-Driven Approach to Database Replication and Partitioning 2010 VLDB 0.00030701814
474 Skew-Aware Automatic Database Partitioning in Shared-Nothing, Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00017638418
542 FOEDUS: OLTP Engine for a Thousand Cores and NVRAM 2015 SIGMOD 0.00016620527
649 Building a Database on S3 2008 SIGMOD 0.00015156241
740 Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control 2015 VLDB 0.00014303858
764 The Case for Determinism in Database Systems 2010 VLDB 0.00014110914
885 Rack-Scale In-Memory Join Processing using RDMA 2015 SIGMOD 0.00013222753
928 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB 0.00013012601
1,048 Accelerating Relational Databases by Leveraging Remote Memory and RDMA 2016 SIGMOD 0.00012302514
1,085 High Performance Transactions in Deuteronomy 2015 CIDR 0.00012086316
1,158 Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores 2017 VLDB 0.00011744154
1,437 Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems 2013 VLDB 0.0001064992
1,452 Consistency Rationing in the Cloud: Pay only when it matters 2009 VLDB 0.00010588622
1,585 On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases 2015 SIGMOD 0.00010136077
1,840 On Predictive Modeling for Optimizing Transaction Execution in Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 VLDB 9.5171028e-05
1,952 Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions 2014 SIGMOD 9.2989778e-05
2,018 PIQL: Success-Tolerant Query Processing in the Cloud 2012 VLDB 9.1687512e-05
2,714 Supporting Table Partitioning By Reference in Oracle 2008 SIGMOD 8.0855228e-05
3,258 Locality-aware Partitioning in Parallel Database Systems 2015 SIGMOD 7.4730157e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 937 A Modeling Study of the TPC-C Benchmark 1993 SIGMOD
2 1,370 Designing Distributed Tree-based Index Structures for Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2019 SIGMOD
3 3,173 Rethinking Database High Availability with RDMA Networks 2019 VLDB
4 11,873 Decoupled Transactions: Low Tail Latency Online Transactions Atop Jittery Servers 2022 CIDR
5 928 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB
6 4,431 Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores 2019 VLDB
7 1,885 An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control 2017 VLDB
8 1,952 Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions 2014 SIGMOD
9 1,585 On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases 2015 SIGMOD
10 13,808 Scalable Distributed Transaction Processing on Modern RDMA-enabled Networks 2021 SIGMOD