OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There

Summary: Examines memory-resident OLTP by reworking Shore on a TPC-C to reveal hardware bottlenecks. Shows ~20x speedups via iterative feature removal and optimizations, revealing no single bottleneck; logging, locking, B-tree, and buffer management all matter. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h82f0ecc986ea2a43
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 0.00028317906
Overall Rank: 157 | 98.95%
DOI: 10.1145/1376616.1376713

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Stavros Harizopoulos (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
2. Daniel J. Abadi (Yale University)
3. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
4. Michael Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{harizopoulos_sigmod08,
        title = {{OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There}},
        author = {Harizopoulos, Stavros and Abadi, Daniel J. and Madden, Samuel and Stonebraker, Michael},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '08},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1376616.1376713},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376616.1376713},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 72 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,360	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	6.1614422e-05
5,457	Code generation for efficient query processing in managed runtimes	2014	VLDB	6.1239347e-05
6,959	Memory-Optimized Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Disk-Based Database Systems	2022	VLDB	5.633832e-05
7,373	LRU-C: Parallelizing Database I/Os for Flash SSDs	2023	VLDB	5.5402255e-05
7,741	Lotus: Scalable Multi-Partition Transactions on Single-Threaded Partitioned Databases	2022	VLDB	5.4614829e-05
8,140	Concurrent Prefix Recovery: Performing CPR on a Database	2019	SIGMOD	5.3920142e-05
8,390	Thread Cooperation in Multicore Architectures for Frequency Counting over Multiple Data Streams	2009	VLDB	5.3412917e-05
8,572	Starry: Multi-master Transaction Processing on Semi-leader Architecture	2023	VLDB	5.3126816e-05
8,983	Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management	2025	CIDR	5.2433703e-05
9,465	Executing Long-Running Transactions in Synchronization-Free Main Memory Database Systems	2013	CIDR	5.1726081e-05
9,791	TiQuE: Improving the Transactional Performance of Analytical Systems for True Hybrid Workloads	2023	VLDB	5.1259267e-05
9,803	ScaleCache: Scalable and Production-grade Buffer Management for Disk-based Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.1257999e-05
9,946	OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck	2025	CIDR	5.1038322e-05
10,177	BTrim - Hybrid In-Memory Database Architecture for Extreme Transaction Processing in VLDBs	2018	VLDB	5.0673771e-05
10,272	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0485061e-05
10,669	Predictive Translation: High-Performance Buffer Management Without the Trade-Offs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,190	Moving on From Group Commit: Autonomous Commit Enables High Throughput and Low Latency on NVMe SSDs	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,352	Enhancing Transaction Processing through Indirection Skipping	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,542	High-Performance Query Processing with NVMe Arrays: Spilling without Killing Performance	2024	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,279	The Next 700 Transaction Processing Engines	2017	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,356	Nitro: A Fast, Scalable In-Memory Storage Engine for NoSQL Global Secondary Index	2016	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,581	DAX: A Widely Distributed Multi-tenant Storage Service for DBMS Hosting	2013	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12	C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS	2005	VLDB	0.00068998927
27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.0005158963
46	Benchmarking Database Systems: A Systematic Approach	1983	VLDB	0.00044784799
69	Making B+-Trees Cache Conscious in Main Memory	2000	SIGMOD	0.00037950385
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037859131
110	DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?	1999	VLDB	0.00032700879
207	Cache Conscious Indexing for Decision-Support in Main Memory	1999	VLDB	0.00024970987
221	ARIES/KVL: A Key-Value Locking Method for Concurrency Control of Multiaction Transactions Operating on B-Tree Indexes	1990	VLDB	0.00024274803
229	A Study of Index Structures for Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	VLDB	0.00023911856
268	Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications	1985	SIGMOD	0.00022673125
302	Shoring Up Persistent Applications	1994	SIGMOD	0.0002167061
381	Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion	2007	CIDR	0.00019491561
2,708	An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse	2006	VLDB	8.1067346e-05
2,918	Database Architectures for New Hardware	2004	VLDB	7.8578401e-05

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