Low overhead concurrency control for partitioned main memory databases

Database partitioning is a technique for improving the performance of distributed OLTP databases, since "single partition" transactions that access data on one partition do not need coordination with other partitions. For workloads that are amenable to partitioning, some argue that transactions should be executed serially on each partition without any concurrency at all. This strategy makes sense for a main memory database where there are no disk or user stalls, since the CPU can be fully utilized and the overhead of traditional concurrency control, such as two-phase locking, can be avoided. Unfortunately, many OLTP applications have some transactions which access multiple partitions. This introduces network stalls in order to coordinate distributed transactions, which will limit the performance of a database that does not allow concurrency.