Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Summary: Comprehensive study of ad hoc transactions—application-coordinated DB operations—in 8 open-source web apps (91 instances, up to 16 per app; 71 critical). Findings: ad hoc concurrency control is more flexible than standard DB transactions, yet more error-prone (53 correctness issues; 33 developer-confirmed), suggesting performance gains from leveraging application semantics and implications for DB research. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6496
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 6.2289734e-05
Overall Rank: 5,406 | 62.92%
DOI: 10.1145/3514221.3526120

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Chuzhe Tang (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
2. Zhaoguo Wang (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
3. Xiaodong Zhang (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
4. Qianmian Yu (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
5. Binyu Zang (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
6. Haibing Guan (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
7. Haibo Chen (Chinese Ministry of Education; Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tang_sigmod22,
        title = {{Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly}},
        author = {Tang, Chuzhe and Wang, Zhaoguo and Zhang, Xiaodong and Yu, Qianmian and Zang, Binyu and Guan, Haibing and Chen, Haibo},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '22},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3514221.3526120},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3514221.3526120},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,347	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.6375582e-05
7,767	Epoxy: ACID Transactions Across Diverse Data Stores	2023	VLDB	5.5485804e-05
8,411	Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data	2024	VLDB	5.4309351e-05
9,517	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2566631e-05
9,869	Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.2043672e-05
10,782	Styx: Transactional Stateful Functions on Streaming Dataflows	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,879	Fair Transaction Processing for Multi-Tenant Databases	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,926	Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 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
64	Sagas	1987	SIGMOD	0.00038756588
214	ARIES/KVL: A Key-Value Locking Method for Concurrency Control of Multiaction Transactions Operating on B-Tree Indexes	1990	VLDB	0.00024680756
233	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023815642
867	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013511197
958	ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging	1992	SIGMOD	0.00012956148
1,240	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011536847
1,705	Split-Transactions for Open-Ended Activities	1988	VLDB	9.9629987e-05
2,052	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD	9.251901e-05
2,166	Precision Locks	1981	SIGMOD	9.0500644e-05
2,234	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.8937932e-05
3,013	Opportunities for Optimism in Contended Main-Memory Multicore Transactions	2020	VLDB	7.8518631e-05
3,186	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.6559187e-05
3,784	Multi-Version Range Concurrency Control in Deuteronomy	2015	VLDB	7.1268687e-05
3,880	Controlled Lock Violation	2013	SIGMOD	7.0491452e-05
3,985	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.9738485e-05
4,718	Solving the Phantom Problem by Predicative Optimistic Concurrency Control	1983	VLDB	6.5468872e-05
6,099	Transaction Repair for Multi-Version Concurrency Control	2017	SIGMOD	5.9776969e-05
6,509	Scalable Transactions across Heterogeneous NoSQL Key-Value Data Stores	2013	VLDB	5.8572742e-05
6,574	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.8371181e-05
7,343	Transaction Management In An Object-Oriented Database System	1988	SIGMOD	5.6383799e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,052	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD
2	6,983	Ensuring Relaxed Atomicity for Flexible Transactions in Multidatabase Systems	1994	SIGMOD
3	3,053	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD
4	5,708	Concurrency Control for Resilient Nested Transactions	1983	PODS
5	7,198	Nested Transactions with Multiple Commit Points: An Approach to the Structuring of Advanced Database Applications	1984	VLDB
6	14,450	Safety Of Non-Well-Locked Transaction Systems	1986	PODS
7	9,097	On Correctness of Non-serializable Executions	1993	PODS
8	2,084	Transaction Synchronisation In Object Bases	1988	PODS
9	9,517	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD
10	7,347	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR