Xinjing Zhou(周信静)

I am a PhD candidate at MIT DSG advised by Mike Stonebraker.

I am a PhD candidate in MIT’s Data Systems Group, advised by Mike Stonebraker. My research interests span database systems and operating systems, with a focus on rethinking the systems stack for modern data-intensive applications. In particular, I work on high-performance DBMS, DB–OS co-design, kernel bypass, and networking support for data systems. My work aims to make database systems run more efficiently on modern hardware without sacrificing practicality or deployability. I am broadly interested in how system abstractions—such as the OS, memory hierarchy, and network stack—can be redesigned or bypassed to better support the needs of modern data processing engines.

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Publications
Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems
Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
To appear in VLDB 2026

Tiered-Indexing: Optimizing Access Methods for Skew
Xinjing Zhou , Xiangpeng Hao, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
The VLDB Journal 34, 45 (2025)
code

Practical DB-OS Co-Design with Privileged Kernel Bypass
Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Jinming Hu, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data, 2025, Volume 3, Issue 1, Article 64
slides/ code

OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck
Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
Proceedings of The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2025
slides

Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory
Xiangpeng Hao, Xinjing Zhou, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data, 2024, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp 1–26

Epoxy: ACID Transactions across Diverse Data Stores
Peter Kraft, Qian Li, Xinjing Zhou, Peter Bailis, Michael Stonebraker, Matei Zaharia, Xiangyao Yu
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2023, Volume 16, Issue 11, pp 2742–2754

Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets
Xinjing Zhou, Xiangyao Yu, Goetz Graefe, Michael Stonebraker
Proceedings of The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2023.
video / code / slides

Lotus: Scalable Multi-Partition Transactions on Single-Threaded Partitioned Databases
Xinjing Zhou, Xiangyao Yu, Goetz Graefe, Michael Stonebraker
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2022
code/ slides

Spitfire: A Three-Tier Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non-Volatile Memory
Xinjing Zhou, Joy Arulraj, Andy Pavlo, David Cohen
Proceedings of the SIGMOD, 2021
video / code

DPTree: Differential Indexing for Persistent Memory
Xinjing Zhou, Lidan Shou, Ke Chen, Wei Hu, Gang Chen
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2020
video / code

Talks

Practical DB-OS Co-design with Privileged Kernel Bypass, Salesforce Database Reading Group, June 2025

Practical DB-OS Co-design with Privileged Kernel Bypass, Columbia DB Seminar, March 2025

OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later, Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, March 2025

Services

  • External reviewer for SIGMOD 2021, VLDB 2021
  • External reviewer for VLDBJ 2022, VLDBJ 2024.


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