A system comprising: at least one hardware device processor ; and a computer-readable storage medium storing executable instructions that, when executed, cause one or more of the at least one hardware device processor to: control a transformation of a current state of entries in a mapping table (808; 902) to an updated state in a latch-free manner by bracketing an atomic multi-word compare-and-swap, - MWCAS - operation (802; 912) on a plurality of words (804, 806; 914, 916) in a single hardware transaction using a hardware transactional memory - HTM , the MWCAS operation using hardware primitive operations of the HTM comprising compare-and-swap operations that: perform a first atomic step of a page merge transformation by marking a page as deleted; perform a second atomic step of the page merge transformation by merging an existing key of the deleted page to another page; and perform a third atomic step of the page merge transformation by deleting an identifier of the deleted page and a search key from a parent page, the mapping table entries being associated with a lock-free index of a database. at least one hardware device processor ; and a computer-readable storage medium storing executable instructions that, when executed, cause one or more of the at least one hardware device processor to: control a transformation of a current state of entries in a mapping table (808; 902) to an updated state in a latch-free manner by bracketing an atomic multi-word compare-and-swap, - MWCAS - operation (802; 912) on a plurality of words (804, 806; 914, 916) in a single hardware transaction using a hardware transactional memory - HTM , the MWCAS operation using hardware primitive operations of the HTM comprising compare-and-swap operations that: perform a first atomic step of a page merge transformation by marking a page as deleted; perform a second atomic step of the page merge transformation by merging an existing key of the deleted page to another page; and perform a third atomic step of the page merge transformation by deleting an identifier of the deleted page and a search key from a parent page, control a transformation of a current state of entries in a mapping table (808; 902) to an updated state in a latch-free manner by bracketing an atomic multi-word compare-and-swap, - MWCAS - operation (802; 912) on a plurality of words (804, 806; 914, 916) in a single hardware transaction using a hardware transactional memory - HTM , the MWCAS operation using hardware primitive operations of the HTM comprising compare-and-swap operations that: perform a first atomic step of a page merge transformation by marking a page as deleted; perform a second atomic step of the page merge transformation by merging an existing key of the deleted page to another page; and perform a third atomic step of the page merge transformation by deleting an identifier of the deleted page and a search key from a parent page, perform a first atomic step of a page merge transformation by marking a page as deleted; perform a second atomic step of the page merge transformation by merging an existing key of the deleted page to another page; and perform a third atomic step of the page merge transformation by deleting an identifier of the deleted page and a search key from a parent page, the mapping table entries being associated with a lock-free index of a database. <EOS>