OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck

Summary: Revisits 2008 OLTP assumptions with whole-stack benchmarks on modern hardware, showing inter-component communication and messaging—not CPU-bound buffer/concurrency work—are now the primary OLTP bottleneck. Analyzes stored-proc vs client-side models and shows stronger UDF isolation raises messaging costs, producing security/multi-tenant tradeoffs and motivating communication-efficient designs. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hae6148b0313ea482
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.1038322e-05
Overall Rank: 9,946 | 33.13%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Xinjing Zhou (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Viktor Leis (Technical University of Munich)
3. Xiangyao Yu (University of Wisconsin)
4. Michael Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zhou_cidr25,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '25},
        title = {{OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Zhou, Xinjing and Leis, Viktor and Yu, Xiangyao and Stonebraker, Michael},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,906	High-Performance DBMSs with io_uring: When and How to Use It	2026	VLDB	5.1103839e-05
10,807	dpKernels: Harvesting DPU Compute Resources for Data-path Efficiency in Cloud Data Processing	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,866	Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038531147
157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.00028317906
543	Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud	2019	SIGMOD	0.0001663263
2,394	What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research	2017	SIGMOD	8.5295579e-05
2,954	Automatic Partitioning of Database Applications	2012	VLDB	7.8126137e-05
5,360	LeanStore: A High-Performance Storage Engine for NVMe SSDs	2024	VLDB	6.1614422e-05
5,545	Tigger: A Database Proxy That Bounces With User-Bypass	2023	VLDB	6.0886041e-05
6,575	WeBridge: Synthesizing Stored Procedures for Large-Scale Real-World Web Applications	2024	SIGMOD	5.7453775e-05
7,073	Yellowbrick: An Elastic Data Warehouse on Kubernetes	2024	CIDR	5.6067524e-05
7,959	Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware	2024	VLDB	5.4175386e-05
8,571	Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass	2025	SIGMOD	5.3127636e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	797	Low Overhead Concurrency Control for Partitioned Main Memory Databases	2010	SIGMOD
2	13,883	Smoothing non-uniform communication latencies for OLTP	2015	CIDR
3	12,279	The Next 700 Transaction Processing Engines	2017	SIGMOD
4	8,050	Micro-architectural Analysis of OLAP: Limitations and Opportunities	2020	VLDB
5	3,863	Database Buffer Size Investigation for OLTP Workloads	1997	SIGMOD
6	4,899	Micro-architectural Analysis of In-memory OLTP	2016	SIGMOD
7	11,465	Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL? The Database AND the Application Have a BIG DEAL: Their Isolation Semantics	2024	CIDR
8	9,782	Sharing Opportunities for OLTP Workloads in Different Isolation Levels	2020	VLDB
9	1,972	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB
10	157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD