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: 0.00014110914
Overall Rank: 764 | 94.89%
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 44 of 44 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
54	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040489652
139	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029386971
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023872855
539	TrustedDB: A Trusted Hardware based Database with Privacy and Data Confidentiality	2011	SIGMOD	0.00016701521
636	ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015329098
928	The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign	2016	VLDB	0.00013012601
1,263	Fast Checkpoint Recovery Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications	2011	SIGMOD	0.00011270111
1,349	The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00010940559
1,437	Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems	2013	VLDB	0.0001064992
1,575	Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010160119
1,655	Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database	2020	VLDB	9.9502338e-05
1,710	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.797642e-05
1,885	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.4209865e-05
2,390	Low-Overhead Asynchronous Checkpointing in Main-Memory Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	8.5227929e-05
2,703	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB	8.0952583e-05
3,011	Query Fresh: Log Shipping on Steroids	2018	VLDB	7.7421635e-05
3,097	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.6354651e-05
3,127	Analytics in Motion: High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database	2015	SIGMOD	7.6047902e-05
3,264	Scaling Multicore Databases via Constrained Parallel Execution	2016	SIGMOD	7.4667818e-05
3,752	MaaT: Effective and scalable coordination of distributed transactions in the cloud	2014	VLDB	7.0324903e-05
4,038	STAR: Scaling Transactions through Asymmetric Replication	2019	VLDB	6.8244412e-05
4,040	Scalable Replay-Based Replication For Fast Databases	2017	VLDB	6.8229639e-05
4,081	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.801179e-05
4,222	NeuChain: A Fast Permissioned Blockchain System with Deterministic Ordering	2022	VLDB	6.7110362e-05
4,294	Reducing Database Locking Contention Through Multi-version Concurrency	2014	VLDB	6.6660284e-05
4,844	Epoch-based Commit and Replication in Distributed OLTP Databases	2021	VLDB	6.3720999e-05
5,208	PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory	2024	SIGMOD	6.215627e-05
5,821	Cornus: Atomic Commit for a Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation	2023	VLDB	5.9660099e-05
6,353	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.78729e-05
6,506	Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated Systems	2024	VLDB	5.7453191e-05
6,548	C5: Cloned Concurrency Control that Always Keeps Up	2023	VLDB	5.7321729e-05
6,767	Don’t Look Back, Look into the Future: Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	5.6694268e-05
6,965	GeoGauss: Strongly Consistent and Light-Coordinated OLTP for Geo-Replicated SQL Database	2023	SIGMOD	5.6172617e-05
7,203	MgCrab: Transaction Crabbing for Live Migration in Deterministic Database Systems	2019	VLDB	5.5721192e-05
8,070	Hybrid Deterministic and Nondeterministic Execution of Transactions in Actor Systems	2022	SIGMOD	5.3804923e-05
8,527	T-Part: Partitioning of Transactions for Forward-Pushing in Deterministic Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	5.3084812e-05
9,241	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.1865718e-05
9,624	NV-SQL: Boosting OLTP Performance with Non-Volatile DIMMs	2023	VLDB	5.1372533e-05
10,305	TuskFlow: An Efficient Graph Database for Long-Running Transactions	2025	VLDB	5.0294306e-05
10,315	Wait and See: A Delayed Transactions Partitioning Approach in Deterministic Database Systems for Better Performance	2025	SIGMOD	5.0258044e-05
10,319	Spectrum: Speedy and Strictly-Deterministic Smart Contract Transactions for Blockchain Ledgers	2024	VLDB	5.0258044e-05
10,406	PRDCC: PRedictive Deterministic Concurrency Control under High Contention	2027	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,527	Epoch-based Optimistic Concurrency Control in Geo-replicated Databases	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
11,189	Ultraverse: An Efficient What-if Analysis Framework for Software Applications Interacting with Database Systems	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-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	0.00037761637
166	The Dangers of Replication and a Solution	1996	SIGMOD	0.00027196717
1,168	Fast Algorithms for Maintaining Replica Consistency in Lazy Master Replicated Databases	1999	VLDB	0.00011696293
1,264	Don't be lazy, be consistent: Postgres-R, A new way to implement Database Replication	2000	VLDB	0.00011265551
1,689	A Mean Value Performance Model for Locking in Databases: The Waiting Case	1984	PODS	9.8448241e-05
2,493	FAS - a Freshness-Sensitive Coordination Middleware for a Cluster of OLAP Components	2002	VLDB	8.3721565e-05
2,529	Update Propagation Protocols For Replicated Databases	1999	SIGMOD	8.3184855e-05
2,715	An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse	2006	VLDB	8.0838677e-05
4,002	Evaluation of Remote Backup Algorithms for Transaction Processing Systems	1992	SIGMOD	6.8466648e-05
5,696	Relaxed Currency Serializability for Middle-Tier Caching and Replication	2006	SIGMOD	6.0153173e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,431	Strong consistency is not hard to get: Two-Phase Locking and Two-Phase Commit on Thousands of Cores	2019	VLDB
2	7,757	How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?	2017	PODS
3	8,171	Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines	1989	SIGMOD
4	12,006	Efficient Deterministic Concurrency Control Under Practical Isolation Levels	2021	SIGMOD
5	13,547	DEADLOCK-FREEDOM (AND SAFETY) OF TRANSACTIONS IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE (Extended Abstract)	1985	PODS
6	5,024	Detock: High Performance Multi-region Transactions at Scale	2023	SIGMOD
7	6,039	Replication, Consistency, and Practicality: Are These Mutually Exclusive?	1998	SIGMOD
8	13,371	A Transaction Replication Scheme for a Replicated Database with Node Autonomy	1994	VLDB
9	3,402	Distributed Concurrency Control Performance: A Study of Algorithms, Distribution, and Replication	1988	VLDB
10	2,703	An Evaluation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Deterministic Database Systems	2014	VLDB