Comment by hyc_symas

You're dreaming. None of your explicit memory control operations mean anything in practice, because today everything runs in VMs with no actual control of the underlying hardware. Probably co-resident with an unknown number of other tenants.

As for what you claim the paper's authors were saying - I quoted their text verbatim. Your interpretation is not what they said.

They claimed using mmap safely is impossible, and using it correctly requires more complexity than a traditional DB design. The safety claim was already disproven by multiple researchers. To prove their second claim they would have had to produce a DB that did traditional buffer management and was simpler and more performant than using mmap. They never did any such thing, nor could they.