DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?

Summary: Hardware-level study of four commercial DBMSs on Xeon, using memory-resident queries to attribute execution time across caches, branches, and memory. Finds L2-oriented data placement, L1 instruction-cache optimization, and branch-prediction stalls—not raw processor speed—dominate gains. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: he027e6fffa18c38e
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1999
Pagerank: 0.00032700879
Overall Rank: 110 | 99.27%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Anastassia Ailamaki (University of Wisconsin)
2. David J. DeWitt (University of Wisconsin)
3. Mark D. Hill (University of Wisconsin)
4. David A. Wood (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{ailamaki_vldb99,
        title = {{DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?}},
        author = {Ailamaki, Anastassia and DeWitt, David J. and Hill, Mark D. and Wood, David A.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '99},
        pages = {266},
        year = {1999}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 65 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,050	Micro-architectural Analysis of OLAP: Limitations and Opportunities	2020	VLDB	5.3993433e-05
9,060	EaseDB: A Cache-Oblivious In-Memory Query Processor	2007	SIGMOD	5.2291768e-05
9,127	Automatic Contention Detection and Amelioration for Data-Intensive Operations	2010	SIGMOD	5.2237283e-05
9,166	Planting Trees for scalable and efficient Canonical Hub Labeling	2020	VLDB	5.2148514e-05
9,617	MCC-DB: Minimizing Cache Conflicts in Multi-core Processors for Databases	2009	VLDB	5.1507816e-05
9,772	Lachesis: Robust Database Storage Management Based on Device-specific Performance Characteristics	2003	VLDB	5.1324546e-05
10,074	Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing	2025	CIDR	5.0855548e-05
10,174	Thriving in the No Man’s Land between Compilers and Databases	2019	CIDR	5.0681899e-05
10,177	BTrim - Hybrid In-Memory Database Architecture for Extreme Transaction Processing in VLDBs	2018	VLDB	5.0673771e-05
10,666	P-MOSS: Scheduling Main-Memory Indexes Over NUMA Servers Using Next Token Prediction	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,542	High-Performance Query Processing with NVMe Arrays: Spilling without Killing Performance	2024	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,545	DBMS Metrology: Measuring Query Time	2013	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,685	A Demonstration of HYRISE—A Main Memory Hybrid Storage Engine	2011	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,895	Towards Efficient Main-Memory Use For Optimum Tree Index Update	2008	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
13,155	Analyzing Energy Behavior of Spatial Access Methods for Memory-Resident Data	2001	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
76	Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing	1994	VLDB	0.00036898845
223	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.0002412513
846	High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations	1997	SIGMOD	0.00013522859
1,823	Memory Management during Run Generation in External Sorting	1998	SIGMOD	9.5606648e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	12,911	Managing Query Compilation Memory Consumption to Improve DBMS Throughput	2007	CIDR
2	939	Buffering Database Operations for Enhanced Instruction Cache Performance	2004	SIGMOD
3	10,074	Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing	2025	CIDR
4	998	What happens during a Join? Dissecting CPU and Memory Optimization Effects	2000	VLDB
5	76	Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing	1994	VLDB
6	12,440	Databases and Hardware: The Beginning and Sequel of a Beautiful Friendship	2015	VLDB
7	5,598	Database Processing-in-Memory: An Experimental Study	2020	VLDB
8	27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB
9	2,699	Database Servers on Chip Multiprocessors: Limitations and Opportunities	2007	CIDR
10	2,918	Database Architectures for New Hardware	2004	VLDB