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A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels

Summary: ANSI SQL-92 isolation levels critiqued: phenomena-based criteria and locking semantics mischaracterize common levels. Investigates ambiguity, formalizes phenomena, introduces new ones, and defines Snapshot Isolation as a central multiversion isolation type. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
2784
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
1995
Pagerank
0.00083899338
Overall Rank
23 | 99.85%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 34 of 134 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
9,751 VeriTxn: Verifiable Transactions for Cloud-Native Databases with Storage Disaggregation 2023 SIGMOD 4.2856385e-05
9,758 RushMon: Real-time Isolation Anomalies Monitoring 2018 SIGMOD 4.2854903e-05
9,793 Chimera: A system design of dual storage and traversal-join unified query processing for SQL/PGQ 2025 VLDB 4.2777144e-05
9,814 Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates 2021 VLDB 4.2742278e-05
9,815 Deciding Robustness for Lower SQL Isolation Levels 2020 PODS 4.2742278e-05
9,903 TiQuE: Improving the Transactional Performance of Analytical Systems for True Hybrid Workloads 2023 VLDB 4.2539423e-05
10,251 Pisco: An Isolation Bug Case Reduction and Deduplication Framework 2026 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,381 Boosting OLTP Performance with Per-Page Logging on NVDIMM 2025 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
10,558 VerIso: Verifiable Isolation Guarantees for Database Transactions 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,565 Efficient Concurrent Updates to Persistent Randomized Binary Search Trees 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,587 Fucci: Database Transaction Fuzzing via Random Conflict Construction and Multilevel Constraint Solving 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,614 Oze: Decentralized Graph-based Concurrency Control for Long-running Update Transactions 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,615 Hermes: Off-the-Shelf Real-Time Transactional Analytics 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,630 Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,649 Using Read Promotion and Mixed Isolation Levels for Performant Yet Serializable Execution of Transaction Programs 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,685 Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,770 MD-MVCC: Multi-version Concurrency Control for Schema Changes in Azure SQL Database 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,787 Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,896 Leopard: A General Test Suite for Isolation Level Verification 2024 CIDR 4.1905499e-05
10,898 Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL? The Database AND the Application Have a BIG DEAL: Their Isolation Semantics 2024 CIDR 4.1905499e-05
10,911 When View- and Conflict-Robustness Coincide for Multiversion Concurrency Control 2024 PODS 4.1905499e-05
11,168 Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions in a Multiversion Setting 2023 PODS 4.1905499e-05
11,183 MRVs: Enforcing Numeric Invariants in Parallel Updates to Hotspots with Randomized Splitting 2023 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,317 Decoupled Transactions: Low Tail Latency Online Transactions Atop Jittery Servers 2022 CIDR 4.1905499e-05
11,329 Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch 2022 PODS 4.1905499e-05
11,379 In-Page Shadowing and Two-Version Timestamp Ordering for Mobile DBMSs 2022 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,453 Efficiently Supporting Adaptive Multi-Level Serializability Models in Distributed Database Systems 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,495 A Client-centric Approach to Transactional Datastores 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,857 The Challenges of Global-scale Data Management 2016 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,869 Comdb2: Bloomberg’s Highly Available Relational Database System 2016 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
12,315 Optimizing I/O-Intensive Transactions in Highly Interactive Applications 2009 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
12,349 Pangea: An Eager Database Replication Middleware guaranteeing Snapshot Isolation without Modification of Database Servers 2009 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
12,583 Transaction support for indexed summary views 2004 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
12,724 Exploiting Versions for Handling Updates in Broadcast Disks 1999 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
26 The Design Of The Postgres Storage System 1987 VLDB 0.00082350905
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