Detecting Join Bugs in Database Engines via Join Implication Reasoning

Summary: Join Implication Reasoning (JIR) derives a target join’s oracle from semantically related join results, enabling scalable, predicate-agnostic testing across join types. Evaluated on 11 DBMSs, it exposed 100 unique bugs, including 69 join-logic defects. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 26 2026)

Paper ID: 7409
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 10,218 | 29.90%
DOI: 10.1145/3802036

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Zhaokun Xiang (National University of Singapore)
2. Suyang Zhong (National University of Singapore)
3. Manuel Rigger (National University of Singapore)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{xiang_sigmod26,
        title = {{Detecting Join Bugs in Database Engines via Join Implication Reasoning}},
        author = {Xiang, Zhaokun and Zhong, Suyang and Rigger, Manuel},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '26},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3802036},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3802036},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0024089429
18	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00059284255
208	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024968157
271	TiDB: A Raft-based HTAP Database	2020	VLDB	0.00022703024
290	An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems	1998	PODS	0.0002227038
422	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00018732744
1,080	Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations	2021	VLDB	0.00012257972
1,832	DSB: A Decision Support Benchmark for Workload-Driven and Traditional Database Systems	2021	VLDB	9.6607418e-05
2,000	Data Management for Data Science: Towards Embedded Analytics	2020	CIDR	9.3336258e-05
2,044	Detecting Logic Bugs of Join Optimizations in DBMS	2023	SIGMOD	9.2663577e-05
3,813	Query Simplification: Graceful Degradation for Join-Order Optimization	2009	SIGMOD	7.1051056e-05
3,903	Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans	2024	SIGMOD	7.0304586e-05
7,427	Constant Optimization Driven Database System Testing	2025	SIGMOD	5.620674e-05

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2	1,265	An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory	2016	SIGMOD
3	89	On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results	1991	SIGMOD
4	3,903	Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans	2024	SIGMOD
5	1,740	Adopting Worst-Case Optimal Joins in Relational Database Systems	2020	VLDB
6	3,134	Efficient Join Algorithms For Large Database Tables in a Multi-GPU Environment	2021	VLDB
7	10,358	Detecting Logic Bugs in DBMSs via Equivalent Data Construction	2026	SIGMOD
8	1,313	Reverse Engineering Complex Join Queries	2013	SIGMOD
9	2,044	Detecting Logic Bugs of Join Optimizations in DBMS	2023	SIGMOD
10	10,402	SRS: Detecting Logic Bugs of Join Implementation in DBMSs via Set Relation Synthesis	2026	SIGMOD