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: h1a605a9271a03289
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 6.0913798e-05
Overall Rank: 5,527 | 62.86%
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
7,484	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.5122541e-05
7,516	Epoxy: ACID Transactions Across Diverse Data Stores	2023	VLDB	5.5028641e-05
8,591	Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data	2024	VLDB	5.3065663e-05
9,286	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2017718e-05
10,065	Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.0851868e-05
11,208	Styx: Transactional Stateful Functions on Streaming Dataflows	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,289	Fair Transaction Processing for Multi-Tenant Databases	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,325	Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-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	0.00058759613
66	Sagas	1987	SIGMOD	0.00038030001
221	ARIES/KVL: A Key-Value Locking Method for Concurrency Control of Multiaction Transactions Operating on B-Tree Indexes	1990	VLDB	0.00024269058
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023915456
808	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013772337
983	ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging	1992	SIGMOD	0.00012701317
1,248	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011347831
1,740	Split-Transactions for Open-Ended Activities	1988	VLDB	9.7442978e-05
2,080	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD	9.0739379e-05
2,203	Precision Locks	1981	SIGMOD	8.8688057e-05
2,279	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.7047643e-05
3,064	Opportunities for Optimism in Contended Main-Memory Multicore Transactions	2020	VLDB	7.6883866e-05
3,200	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.5406953e-05
3,858	Multi-Version Range Concurrency Control in Deuteronomy	2015	VLDB	6.9658872e-05
3,933	Controlled Lock Violation	2013	SIGMOD	6.9150839e-05
4,067	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.8196985e-05
4,812	Solving the Phantom Problem by Predicative Optimistic Concurrency Control	1983	VLDB	6.4030883e-05
6,204	Transaction Repair for Multi-Version Concurrency Control	2017	SIGMOD	5.8486125e-05
6,642	Scalable Transactions across Heterogeneous NoSQL Key-Value Data Stores	2013	VLDB	5.7233463e-05
6,700	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.7035574e-05
7,491	Transaction Management In An Object-Oriented Database System	1988	SIGMOD	5.5096389e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	7,125	Ensuring Relaxed Atomicity for Flexible Transactions in Multidatabase Systems	1994	SIGMOD
2	13,196	Concurrency Control and Recovery in Transactional Process Management	1999	PODS
3	3,095	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD
4	5,834	Concurrency Control for Resilient Nested Transactions	1983	PODS
5	7,343	Nested Transactions with Multiple Commit Points: An Approach to the Structuring of Advanced Database Applications	1984	VLDB
6	14,766	Safety Of Non-Well-Locked Transaction Systems	1986	PODS
7	9,280	On Correctness of Non-serializable Executions	1993	PODS
8	2,134	Transaction Synchronisation In Object Bases	1988	PODS
9	9,286	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD
10	7,484	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR