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On the complexity of checking transactional consistency

Authors:

Ranadeep Biswas,

Constantin EneaAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 165, Pages 1 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/3360591

Published: 10 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Transactions simplify concurrent programming by enabling computations on shared data that are isolated from other concurrent computations and are resilient to failures. Modern databases provide different consistency models for transactions corresponding to different tradeoffs between consistency and availability. In this work, we investigate the problem of checking whether a given execution of a transactional database adheres to some consistency model. We show that consistency models like read committed, read atomic, and causal consistency are polynomial-time checkable while prefix consistency and snapshot isolation are NP-complete in general. These results complement a previous NP-completeness result concerning serializability. Moreover, in the context of NP-complete consistency models, we devise algorithms that are polynomial time assuming that certain parameters in the input executions, e.g., the number of sessions, are fixed. We evaluate the scalability of these algorithms in the context of several production databases.

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Liu SGu LWei HBasin D(2024)Plume: Efficient and Complete Black-Box Checking of Weak Isolation LevelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897428:OOPSLA2(876-904)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

October 2019

2077 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3366395

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Copyright © 2019 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 October 2019

Published in PACMPL Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Liu SGu LWei HBasin D(2024)Plume: Efficient and Complete Black-Box Checking of Weak Isolation LevelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897428:OOPSLA2(876-904)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689742
Geng CBlanas SBond MWang Y(2024)IsoPredict: Dynamic Predictive Analysis for Detecting Unserializable Behaviors in Weakly Isolated Data Store ApplicationsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563918:PLDI(343-367)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
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Vandevoort BKetsman BNeven F(2024)When View- and Conflict-Robustness Coincide for Multiversion Concurrency ControlProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36515922:2(1-16)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651592
Clark JDonaldson AWickerson JRigger M(2024)Validating Database System Isolation Level Implementations with Version Certificate RecoveryProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650080(754-768)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
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Cui ZDou WGao YWang DSong JZheng YWang TYang RXu KHu YWei JHuang TRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Understanding Transaction Bugs in Database SystemsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639207(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Dumbrava SJin ZOzkan BQiu J(2024)Checking Transaction Isolation Violations Using Graph QueriesGraph Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-64285-2_11(203-213)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64285-2_11
Huang KLiu SChen ZWei HBasin DLi HPan A(2023)Efficient Black-Box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in DatabasesProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3583140.358314516:6(1264-1276)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3583140.3583145
Bouajjani AEnea CRomán-Calvo E(2023)Dynamic Partial Order Reduction for Checking Correctness against Transaction Isolation LevelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912437:PLDI(565-590)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
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Zhang JJi YMu STan CFedorova ANarayanan DDi Luna GQuerzoni L(2023)Viper: A Fast Snapshot Isolation CheckerProceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3552326.3567492(654-671)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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Dou WCui ZDai QSong JWang DGao YWang WWei JChen LWang HZhong HHuang T(2023)Detecting Isolation Bugs via Transaction Oracle Construction2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00101(1123-1135)Online publication date: May-2023
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