The Case for Determinism in Database Systems

Summary: Proposes deterministic concurrency control enforcing a predetermined serial order, enabling synchronization-free active replication and eliminating two-phase commit—even for distributed transactions. A simple deadlock-avoidance scheme yields strong availability and performance benefits. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h8f566535eb5e9c5c
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.00014018588
Overall Rank: 782 | 94.75%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920853

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexander Thomson (Yale University)
2. Daniel J. Abadi (Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{thomson_vldb10,
        title = {{The Case for Determinism in Database Systems}},
        author = {Thomson, Alexander and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        pages = {70--80},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920853},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920853},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 43 of 43 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
55	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040454492
139	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029466567
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023915456
538	TrustedDB: A Trusted Hardware based Database with Privacy and Data Confidentiality	2011	SIGMOD	0.00016756835
635	ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015362118
945	The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign	2016	VLDB	0.00012933247
1,260	Fast Checkpoint Recovery Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications	2011	SIGMOD	0.00011293425
1,339	The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale	2017	VLDB	0.0001097043
1,433	Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems	2013	VLDB	0.0001067528
1,573	Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010192267
1,694	Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database	2020	VLDB	9.8520416e-05
1,704	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.8268213e-05
1,945	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.3239199e-05
2,380	Low-Overhead Asynchronous Checkpointing in Main-Memory Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	8.5466497e-05
2,800	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB	7.988872e-05
3,007	Query Fresh: Log Shipping on Steroids	2018	VLDB	7.7593448e-05
3,095	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.6523803e-05
3,124	Analytics in Motion: High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database	2015	SIGMOD	7.6222513e-05
3,262	Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution	2016	SIGMOD	7.4800686e-05
3,751	MaaT: Effective and scalable coordination of distributed transactions in the cloud	2014	VLDB	7.0495774e-05
4,023	STAR: Scaling Transactions through Asymmetric Replication	2019	VLDB	6.8464253e-05
4,037	Scalable Replay-Based Replication For Fast Databases	2017	VLDB	6.8359601e-05
4,067	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.8196985e-05
4,282	Reducing Database Locking Contention Through Multi-version Concurrency	2014	VLDB	6.6865871e-05
4,412	NeuChain: A Fast Permissioned Blockchain System with Deterministic Ordering	2022	VLDB	6.6088759e-05
4,822	Epoch-based Commit and Replication in Distributed OLTP Databases	2021	VLDB	6.3931726e-05
5,186	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	6.2357787e-05
5,806	Cornus: Atomic Commit for a Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation	2023	VLDB	5.9858027e-05
6,343	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.8064898e-05
6,496	Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated Systems	2024	VLDB	5.7636324e-05
6,537	C5: Cloned Concurrency Control that Always Keeps Up	2023	VLDB	5.7511899e-05
6,748	Don’t Look Back, Look into the Future: Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	5.6882313e-05
6,944	GeoGauss: Strongly Consistent and Light-Coordinated OLTP for Geo-Replicated SQL Database	2023	SIGMOD	5.6358975e-05
7,182	MgCrab: Transaction Crabbing for Live Migration in Deterministic Database Systems	2019	VLDB	5.5903567e-05
8,051	Hybrid Deterministic and Nondeterministic Execution of Transactions in Actor Systems	2022	SIGMOD	5.3982707e-05
8,514	T-Part: Partitioning of Transactions for Forward-Pushing in Deterministic Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	5.3243481e-05
9,286	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2017718e-05
9,598	NV-SQL: Boosting OLTP Performance with Non-Volatile DIMMs	2023	VLDB	5.1542966e-05
10,278	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0461162e-05
10,288	Wait and See: A Delayed Transactions Partitioning Approach in Deterministic Database Systems for Better Performance	2025	SIGMOD	5.042478e-05
10,292	Spectrum: Speedy and Strictly-Deterministic Smart Contract Transactions for Blockchain Ledgers	2024	VLDB	5.042478e-05
10,461	Epoch-based Optimistic Concurrency Control in Geo-replicated Databases	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,129	Ultraverse: An Efficient What-if Analysis Framework for Software Applications Interacting with Database Systems	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037851432
165	The Dangers of Replication and a Solution	1996	SIGMOD	0.00027257943
1,169	Fast Algorithms for Maintaining Replica Consistency in Lazy Master Replicated Databases	1999	VLDB	0.0001172435
1,264	Don't be lazy, be consistent: Postgres-R, A new way to implement Database Replication	2000	VLDB	0.00011281976
1,685	A Mean Value Performance Model for Locking in Databases: The Waiting Case	1984	PODS	9.8683433e-05
2,489	FAS - a Freshness-Sensitive Coordination Middleware for a Cluster of OLAP Components	2002	VLDB	8.3929331e-05
2,530	Update Propagation Protocols For Replicated Databases	1999	SIGMOD	8.3354416e-05
2,709	An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse	2006	VLDB	8.103163e-05
3,997	Evaluation of Remote Backup Algorithms for Transaction Processing Systems	1992	SIGMOD	6.8624939e-05
5,702	Relaxed Currency Serializability for Middle-Tier Caching and Replication	2006	SIGMOD	6.0289491e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,416	Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores	2019	VLDB
2	7,744	How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?	2017	PODS
3	8,155	Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines	1989	SIGMOD
4	11,962	Efficient Deterministic Concurrency Control Under Practical Isolation Levels	2021	SIGMOD
5	13,506	DEADLOCK-FREEDOM (AND SAFETY) OF TRANSACTIONS IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE (Extended Abstract)	1985	PODS
6	5,001	Detock: High Performance Multi-region Transactions at Scale	2023	SIGMOD
7	6,025	Replication, Consistency, and Practicality: Are These Mutually Exclusive?	1998	SIGMOD
8	13,330	A Transaction Replication Scheme for a Replicated Database with Node Autonomy	1994	VLDB
9	3,394	Distributed Concurrency Control Performance: A Study of Algorithms, Distribution, and Replication	1988	VLDB
10	2,800	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB