Back to papers
A Top-Down Approach to Achieving Performance Predictability in Database Systems
Summary: Top-down study of performance predictability across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and VoltDB using TProfiler identifies key latency-variance sources. Proposes Variance-Aware Transaction Scheduling (VATS) and a lazy buffer-pool policy, yielding up to 5.6x variance reduction and 6.3x 99th percentile latency, with VATS adopted in MySQL/MariaDB.
(summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Paper ID
h75664b9b9ce75554
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2017
Pagerank
6.3548977e-05
Overall Rank
4,913 | 66.98%
DOI
10.1145/3035918.3064016
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{huang_sigmod17,
title = {{A Top-Down Approach to Achieving Performance Predictability in Database Systems}},
author = {Huang, Jiamin and Mozafari, Barzan and Schoenebeck, Grant and Wenisch, Thomas F.},
series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/3035918.3064016},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3064016},
year = {2017}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.
Rank
Citing Paper
Year
Venue
Pagerank
2,881
Distributed Lock Management with RDMA: Decentralization without Starvation 2018
SIGMOD
7.9114212e-05
3,979
Efficient Deep Learning Pipelines for Accurate Cost Estimations Over Large Scale Query Workload 2021
SIGMOD
6.8791817e-05
4,121
On Performance Stability in LSM-based Storage Systems 2020
VLDB
6.7915554e-05
5,143
Reactors: A Case for Predictable, Virtualized Actor Database Systems 2018
SIGMOD
6.2543554e-05
6,481
Contention-Aware Lock Scheduling for Transactional Databases 2018
VLDB
5.7698115e-05
6,758
Multi-Tenant Cloud Data Services: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities 2022
SIGMOD
5.6877154e-05
7,005
Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling 2024
VLDB
5.6218081e-05
7,930
Runtime Variation in Big Data Analytics 2023
SIGMOD
5.42309e-05
7,987
InTime: Towards Performance Predictability In Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof-of-Stake Consensus 2025
SIGMOD
5.4105928e-05
9,084
Vertically Autoscaling Monolithic Applications with CaaSPER: Scalable Container-as-a-Service Performance Enhanced Resizing Algorithm for the Cloud 2024
SIGMOD
5.2258409e-05
10,230
Modeling Concurrency Control as a Learnable Function 2026
SIGMOD
5.0547568e-05
Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 26 of 26 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
Rank
Cited Paper
Year
Venue
Pagerank
157
OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There 2008
SIGMOD
0.00028316479
235
OLTP-Bench: An Extensible Testbed for Benchmarking Relational Databases 2014
VLDB
0.00023689995
390
QPipe: A Simultaneously Pipelined Relational Query Engine 2005
SIGMOD
0.00019265472
444
Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores 2015
VLDB
0.0001817002
613
Scalable Logging through Emerging Non-Volatile Memory 2014
VLDB
0.00015565961
669
SharedDB: Killing One Thousand Queries With One Stone 2012
VLDB
0.00014975391
704
Main-Memory Scan Sharing For Multi-Core CPUs 2008
VLDB
0.00014653079
783
DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases 2016
SIGMOD
0.0001401708
856
Storage Management in the NVRAM Era 2014
VLDB
0.000134246
864
Let’s Talk About Storage & Recovery Methods for Non-Volatile Memory Database Systems 2015
SIGMOD
0.00013388481
1,034
A Scalable, Predictable Join Operator for Highly Concurrent Data Warehouses 2009
VLDB
0.00012389548
1,040
The DataPath System: A Data-Centric Analytic Processing Engine for Large Data Warehouses 2010
SIGMOD
0.00012358804
1,122
Least Expected Cost Query Optimization: An Exercise in Utility 1999
PODS
0.00011933634
1,124
FlashLogging: Exploiting Flash Devices for Synchronous Logging Performance 2009
SIGMOD
0.00011923526
1,338
SQLVM: Performance Isolation in Multi-Tenant Relational Database-as-a-Service 2013
CIDR
0.00010974439
1,918
Predictable Performance for Unpredictable Workloads 2009
VLDB
9.375192e-05
1,940
Performance and Resource Modeling in Highly-Concurrent OLTP Workloads 2013
SIGMOD
9.3298436e-05
2,009
PIQL: Success-Tolerant Query Processing in the Cloud 2012
VLDB
9.1949132e-05
3,001
Sharing Buffer Pool Memory in Multi-Tenant Relational Database-as-a-Service 2015
VLDB
7.7640097e-05
3,396
Variance Aware Optimization of Parameterized Queries 2010
SIGMOD
7.3386533e-05
3,856
Making Updates Disk-I/O Friendly Using SSDs 2013
VLDB
6.9663383e-05
4,078
DBSeer: Resource and Performance Prediction for Building a Next Generation Database Cloud 2013
CIDR
6.8154962e-05
4,322
Generalized Scale Independence Through Incremental Precomputation 2013
SIGMOD
6.6629734e-05
5,310
CliffGuard: A Principled Framework for Finding Robust Database Designs 2015
SIGMOD
6.184026e-05
5,681
Recovery Architectures for Multiprocessor Database Machines 1985
SIGMOD
6.037392e-05
9,192
DBSeer: Pain-free Database Administration through Workload Intelligence 2015
VLDB
5.2091836e-05
Semantically Similar Papers
#
Overall Rank
Paper
Year
Venue
1
9,018
Low-Latency Transaction Scheduling via Userspace Interrupts: Why Wait or Yield When You Can Preempt? 2025
SIGMOD
2
1,940
Performance and Resource Modeling in Highly-Concurrent OLTP Workloads 2013
SIGMOD
3
1,433
Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems 2013
VLDB
4
7,005
Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling 2024
VLDB
5
11,829
Decoupled Transactions: Low Tail Latency Online Transactions Atop Jittery Servers 2022
CIDR
6
12,797
Optimizing I/O-Intensive Transactions in Highly Interactive Applications 2009
SIGMOD
7
3,095
Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems 2014
SIGMOD
8
6,871
An Almost-Serial Protocol for Transaction Execution in Main-Memory Database Systems 2002
VLDB
9
6,481
Contention-Aware Lock Scheduling for Transactional Databases 2018
VLDB
10
9,286
Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads? 2025
SIGMOD