Audrey Cheng (UC Berkeley)Jan 30, 2026 Title and AbstractRethinking Transaction Scheduling for Database Performance The shift to multi-tenant clouds and growing data demands exacerbate contention on shared data infrastructure. In these environments, contention remains a primary bottleneck to performance. While there is extensive research on concurrency control protocols, these approaches share a fundamental limitation: they handle conflicts only after they have materialized, missing opportunities to improve performance by avoiding conflicts altogether. My research addresses this limitation by revisiting transaction scheduling. Instead of resolving conflicts after they occur, I focus on preventing them by intelligently reordering transactions before execution. I present novel schedulers that leverage this insight to improve performance and ensure fairness on real-world workloads. BioAudrey is a PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Natacha Crooks and Ion Stoica. Her research focuses on performance optimization for database systems. Her work has been deployed in industry databases at Meta, PlanetScale, and TiDB. She was named a Rising Star in EECS and has received an NSF GRFP Fellowship, a Meta Research PhD Fellowship, a Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, and a VLDB Best Industry Paper Award. |