Efficient Optimistic Concurrency Control Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks

Summary: Optimistic concurrency control for distributed DBs uses loosely synchronized clocks to guarantee serializability and external consistency, with a single version per object and per-client invalidations. Simulations show it beats adaptive callback locking at low–moderate contention and scales with clients; high contention causes aborts, suggesting a hybrid path. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hd6356005ee96f549
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1995
Pagerank: 9.0900908e-05
Overall Rank: 2,066 | 86.12%
DOI: 10.1145/223784.223787

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Atul Adya (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Robert Gruber (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Barbara Liskov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
4. Umesh Maheshwari (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{adya_sigmod95,
        title = {{Efficient Optimistic Concurrency Control Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks}},
        author = {Adya, Atul and Gruber, Robert and Liskov, Barbara and Maheshwari, Umesh},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '95},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/223784.223787},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/223784.223787},
        year = {1995}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
786	Cicada: Dependably Fast Multi-Core In-Memory Transactions	2017	SIGMOD	0.00013983316
797	Low Overhead Concurrency Control for Partitioned Main Memory Databases	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013916653
1,573	Carousel: Low-Latency Transaction Processing for Globally-Distributed Data	2018	SIGMOD	0.00010192267
2,337	Towards a Non-2PC Transaction Management in Distributed Database Systems	2016	SIGMOD	8.6180776e-05
2,842	Optimizing Optimistic Concurrency Control for Tree-Structured, Log-Structured Databases	2015	SIGMOD	7.9468719e-05
3,724	Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP Database Management System	2018	VLDB	7.0679706e-05
4,343	Minimizing Commit Latency of Transactions in Geo-Replicated Data Stores	2015	SIGMOD	6.6476636e-05
4,938	Optimistic Concurrency Control by Melding Trees	2011	VLDB	6.3439064e-05
7,576	Natto: Providing Distributed Transaction Prioritization for High-Contention Workloads	2022	SIGMOD	5.4918232e-05
9,594	Safe and Efficient Sharing of Persistent Objects in Thor	1996	SIGMOD	5.154741e-05
10,230	Modeling Concurrency Control as a Learnable Function	2026	SIGMOD	5.0547568e-05
10,542	Perseus: Achieving Strong Consistency and High Data Freshness for Scalable Geo-distributed HTAP	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
13,205	An Adaptive Hybrid Server Architecture for Client Caching Object DBMSs	1999	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
13,237	An Asynchronous Avoidance-Based Cache Consistency Algorithm for Client Caching DBMSs	1998	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,960	Distributed Transaction Management in JASMIN	1984	VLDB	7.8042673e-05
3,919	Fine-Grained Sharing in a Page Server OODBMS	1994	SIGMOD	6.9230012e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,394	Distributed Concurrency Control Performance: A Study of Algorithms, Distribution, and Replication	1988	VLDB
2	13,237	An Asynchronous Avoidance-Based Cache Consistency Algorithm for Client Caching DBMSs	1998	VLDB
3	797	Low Overhead Concurrency Control for Partitioned Main Memory Databases	2010	SIGMOD
4	2,974	The Performance of Concurrency Control Algorithms for Database Management Systems	1984	VLDB
5	170	High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases	2012	VLDB
6	8,155	Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines	1989	SIGMOD
7	6,415	Adaptive Optimistic Concurrency Control for Heterogeneous Workloads	2019	VLDB
8	2,579	Empirical Comparison of Database Concurrency Control Schemes	1983	VLDB
9	3,966	On Being Optimistic about Real-Time Constraints	1990	PODS
10	4,320	Experimental Evaluation of Real-Time Optimistic Concurrency Control Schemes	1991	VLDB