Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems

Summary: Propose write-specific serializability: a schedule is correct if its final DB state equals some serial schedule's. WriteCheck, a lightweight final-state tester, found 22 violations (11 new critical bugs) across six production DBMSs, showing simple tests catch many transaction bugs. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 13901
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.1905499e-05
Overall Rank: 10,630 | 26.13%
DOI: 10.14778/3742728.3742747

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,611	Detecting Schema-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Equivalent Database Construction	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
23	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00083899338
145	Quickly Generating Billion-Record Synthetic Databases	1994	SIGMOD	0.00041403894
405	Massive Stochastic Testing of SQL	1998	VLDB	0.00024046204
882	QAGen: Generating Query-Aware Test Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00015634206
933	Flexible Database Generators	2005	VLDB	0.00015220613
956	Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL	2012	VLDB	0.00015068342
1,228	Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations	2021	VLDB	0.00013158624
1,418	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012082141
1,482	Simple and Realistic Data Generation	2006	VLDB	0.00011715248
1,958	TicToc: Time Traveling Optimistic Concurrency Control	2016	SIGMOD	9.9592064e-05
2,276	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.1320955e-05
2,899	APOLLO: Automatic Detection and Diagnosis of Performance Regressions in Database Systems	2020	VLDB	7.9478977e-05
4,505	Testing Graph Database Systems via Graph-Aware Metamorphic Relations	2024	VLDB	6.1290872e-05
4,999	Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans	2024	SIGMOD	5.7638722e-05
5,835	Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly	2022	SIGMOD	5.3080741e-05
6,143	Detecting Metadata-Related Logic Bugs in Database Systems via Raw Database Construction	2024	VLDB	5.1867156e-05
10,611	Detecting Schema-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Equivalent Database Construction	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05

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