Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases
Summary: PolySI: a black-box checker for snapshot isolation that characterizes SI via generalized polygraphs (sound and complete) and compiles them to a compact SMT encoding with domain-specific pruning. Reproduces 2,477 known anomalies, finds new SI violations in three cloud DBs with human-readable counterexamples, outperforms prior black-box checkers and scales to large workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Kaile Huang (Nanjing University)
- 2. Si Liu (ETH Zurich)
- 3. Zhenge Chen (Nanjing University)
- 4. Hengfeng Wei (Nanjing University)
- 5. David Basin (ETH Zurich)
- 6. Haixiang Li (Tencent)
- 7. Anqun Pan (Tencent)
BibTeX Citation
@article{huang_vldb23,
title = {{Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases}},
author = {Huang, Kaile and Liu, Si and Chen, Zhenge and Wei, Hengfeng and Basin, David and Li, Haixiang and Pan, Anqun},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '23},
volume = {16},
number = {6},
pages = {1264--1276},
doi = {10.14778/3583140.3583145},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3583140.3583145},
year = {2023}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7,686 | TDSQL: Tencent Distributed Database System | 2024 | VLDB | 5.5676271e-05 |
| 9,227 | Detecting Schema-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Equivalent Database Construction | 2025 | VLDB | 5.3023217e-05 |
| 9,871 | Finding Logic Bugs in Spatial Database Engines via Affine Equivalent Inputs | 2024 | SIGMOD | 5.2043672e-05 |
| 10,331 | Testing Graph Databases with Synthesized Queries | 2026 | SIGMOD | 5.093636e-05 |
| 10,597 | Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation | 2026 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 10,820 | VerIso: Verifiable Isolation Guarantees for Database Transactions | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,311 | IsoVista: Black-box Checking Database Isolation Guarantees | 2024 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 | A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels | 1995 | SIGMOD | 0.00058720861 |
| 754 | Lazy Database Replication with Snapshot Isolation | 2006 | VLDB | 0.00014327706 |
| 1,080 | Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations | 2021 | VLDB | 0.00012257972 |
| 1,187 | Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations | 2014 | VLDB | 0.00011760199 |
| 2,052 | ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications | 2017 | SIGMOD | 9.251901e-05 |
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