Leveraging Lock Contention to Improve OLTP Application Performance

Summary: QURO is a query-aware compiler that exploits application semantics by reordering transaction queries, delaying highly contentious (locking) queries. Across OLTP benchmarks, it delivers up to 6.53× higher throughput and 85% lower latency without changing concurrency control. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hba2ba6cd2a6e3de2
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2016
Pagerank: 8.907952e-05
Overall Rank: 2,181 | 85.35%
DOI: 10.14778/2876473.2876481
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Cong Yan (University of Washington)
2. Alvin Cheung (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@article{yan_vldb16,
        title = {{Leveraging Lock Contention to Improve OLTP Application Performance}},
        author = {Yan, Cong and Cheung, Alvin},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {5},
        pages = {444--455},
        doi = {10.14778/2876473.2876481},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2876473.2876481},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,072	High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility	2017	VLDB	0.00012167865
2,279	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.7047643e-05
2,881	Distributed Lock Management with RDMA: Decentralization without Starvation	2018	SIGMOD	7.9114212e-05
3,648	UDO: Universal Database Optimization using Reinforcement Learning	2021	VLDB	7.1366536e-05
3,836	Releasing Locks As Early As You Can: Reducing Contention of Hotspots by Violating Two-Phase Locking	2021	SIGMOD	6.9898745e-05
4,149	SQLCheck: Automated Detection and Diagnosis of SQL Anti-Patterns	2020	SIGMOD	6.7767951e-05
5,116	Fast Failure Recovery for Main-Memory DBMSs on Multicores	2017	SIGMOD	6.2653512e-05
5,320	Chiller: Contention-centric Transaction Execution and Data Partitioning for Modern Networks	2020	SIGMOD	6.1813707e-05
5,386	New Directions in Cloud Programming	2021	CIDR	6.1521989e-05
5,712	How Good is My HTAP System?	2022	SIGMOD	6.0193298e-05
5,793	OLTPShare: The Case for Sharing in OLTP Workloads	2018	VLDB	5.9906809e-05
6,204	Transaction Repair for Multi-Version Concurrency Control	2017	SIGMOD	5.8486125e-05
6,537	C5: Cloned Concurrency Control that Always Keeps Up	2023	VLDB	5.7511899e-05
7,005	Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling	2024	VLDB	5.6218081e-05
8,163	P4DB - The Case for In-Network OLTP	2022	SIGMOD	5.3854685e-05
8,238	Demonstrating UDO: A Unified Approach for Optimizing Transaction Code, Physical Design, and System Parameters via Reinforcement Learning	2021	SIGMOD	5.3696738e-05
10,140	Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates	2021	VLDB	5.0723744e-05
10,160	Generating Application-Specific Data Layouts for In-memory Databases	2019	VLDB	5.0683727e-05
11,143	TXSQL: Lock Optimizations Towards High Contented Workloads	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,841	Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch	2022	PODS	4.9769913e-05
12,024	Interactive Demonstration of SQLCheck	2021	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,048	View-Driven Optimization of Database-Backed Web Applications	2020	CIDR	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
444	Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores	2015	VLDB	0.0001817002
1,275	Rewriting Procedures for Batched Bindings	2008	VLDB	0.00011242055
1,297	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011125055
2,339	A Scalable Lock Manager for Multicores	2013	SIGMOD	8.6123515e-05
2,957	Automatic Partitioning of Database Applications	2012	VLDB	7.808922e-05
3,095	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	7.6523803e-05
3,925	Sloth: Being Lazy is a Virtue (When Issuing Database Queries)	2014	SIGMOD	6.919284e-05
4,139	Latch-Free Data Structures for DBMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation	2013	SIGMOD	6.7825495e-05

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