Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?

Summary: Microbenchmark-driven analysis of latch-free vs latch-based synchronization in DBMSs, isolating factors (contention, cache-coherence, progress guarantees, failure semantics) that shape performance. Shows latch-free is not a universal win—scalability depends on workload and hardware, leaving latches viable in many cases. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hb07d00d7ae77d863
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 6.6349342e-05
Overall Rank: 4,364 | 70.67%
DOI: -
PDF: Download (CC BY 3.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jose M. Faleiro (Yale University)
2. Daniel J. Abadi (Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{faleiro_cidr17,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '17},
        title = {{Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Faleiro, Jose M. and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,704	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.8268213e-05
3,029	Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna	2019	VLDB	7.7341355e-05
6,321	Robust Performance of Main Memory Data Structures by Configuration	2020	SIGMOD	5.8126925e-05
6,532	Contention and Space Management in B-Trees	2021	CIDR	5.7522354e-05
8,649	OptiQL: Robust Optimistic Locking for Memory-Optimized Indexes	2023	SIGMOD	5.2932376e-05
9,732	Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes	2025	VLDB	5.1325223e-05
10,760	Operation-Aware Hybrid Locking for Modern In-Memory Indexes	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,977	Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach	2021	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,128	Concurrent Updates to Pages with Fixed-Size Rows Using Lock-Free Algorithms	2020	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
35	Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine	2013	SIGMOD	0.00047996489
55	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040454492
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037851432
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023915456
268	Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications	1985	SIGMOD	0.00022664149
635	ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System for Heterogeneous Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015362118
756	Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control	2015	VLDB	0.00014208768
983	ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging	1992	SIGMOD	0.00012701317
1,072	High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility	2017	VLDB	0.00012167865
1,161	Mostly-Optimistic Concurrency Control for Highly Contended Dynamic Workloads on a Thousand Cores	2017	VLDB	0.0001176315
1,194	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011581268
1,691	Performance of B-Tree Concurrency Control Algorithms	1991	SIGMOD	9.8555388e-05
1,716	Cache-Conscious Concurrency Control of Main-Memory Indexes on Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems	2001	VLDB	9.8041694e-05
1,857	PALM: Parallel Architecture-Friendly Latch-Free Modifications to B+ Trees on Many-Core Processors	2011	VLDB	9.4935317e-05
2,279	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.7047643e-05
2,339	A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores	2013	SIGMOD	8.6123515e-05
2,441	A Case for Staged Database Systems	2003	CIDR	8.4611767e-05
3,095	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.6523803e-05
3,298	To Lock, Swap, or Elide: On the Interplay of Hardware Transactional Memory and Lock-Free Indexing	2015	VLDB	7.4414299e-05
4,139	Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation	2013	SIGMOD	6.7825495e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,203	Choice and Performance in Locking for Databases	1984	VLDB
2	3,243	Locking and Latching in a Memory-Resident Database System	1992	VLDB
3	13,376	Locking without Blocking: Making Lock Based Concurrent Data Structure Algorithms Nonblocking	1992	PODS
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6	4,265	An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms	1983	SIGMOD
7	4,994	A Quantitative Comparison of Lock Protocols for Centralized Databases	1983	VLDB
8	2,974	The Performance of Concurrency Control Algorithms for Database Management Systems	1984	VLDB
9	2,339	A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores	2013	SIGMOD
10	4,139	Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation	2013	SIGMOD