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: 6.0941977e-05
Overall Rank: 5,524 | 62.87%
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
7,479	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.5137916e-05
7,511	Epoxy: ACID Transactions Across Diverse Data Stores	2023	VLDB	5.5054703e-05
8,584	Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data	2024	VLDB	5.3090795e-05
9,277	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2042355e-05
10,060	Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.0875952e-05
11,199	Styx: Transactional Stateful Functions on Streaming Dataflows	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,281	Fair Transaction Processing for Multi-Tenant Databases	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,317	Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-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	0.00058781151
66	Sagas	1987	SIGMOD	0.00038047495
221	ARIES/KVL: A Key-Value Locking Method for Concurrency Control of Multiaction Transactions Operating on B-Tree Indexes	1990	VLDB	0.00024274803
228	Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems	2015	SIGMOD	0.00023920439
807	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013778758
983	ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency Index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging	1992	SIGMOD	0.00012706526
1,245	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011353116
1,738	Split-Transactions for Open-Ended Activities	1988	VLDB	9.7487946e-05
2,077	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD	9.0781571e-05
2,200	Precision Locks	1981	SIGMOD	8.8727857e-05
2,276	Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention	2016	SIGMOD	8.7087896e-05
3,062	Opportunities for Optimism in Contended Main-Memory Multicore Transactions	2020	VLDB	7.6920087e-05
3,198	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.5442646e-05
3,857	Multi-Version Range Concurrency Control in Deuteronomy	2015	VLDB	6.9690685e-05
3,932	Controlled Lock Violation	2013	SIGMOD	6.9182359e-05
4,064	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.8228568e-05
4,809	Solving the Phantom Problem by Predicative Optimistic Concurrency Control	1983	VLDB	6.4059921e-05
6,207	Transaction Repair for Multi-Version Concurrency Control	2017	SIGMOD	5.8503594e-05
6,638	Scalable Transactions across Heterogeneous NoSQL Key-Value Data Stores	2013	VLDB	5.7260553e-05
6,696	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.7062572e-05
7,486	Transaction Management In An Object-Oriented Database System	1988	SIGMOD	5.5122463e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,077	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD
2	7,123	Ensuring Relaxed Atomicity for Flexible Transactions in Multidatabase Systems	1994	SIGMOD
3	5,833	Concurrency Control for Resilient Nested Transactions	1983	PODS
4	3,093	Lazy Evaluation of Transactions in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD
5	7,340	Nested Transactions with Multiple Commit Points: An Approach to the Structuring of Advanced Database Applications	1984	VLDB
6	14,761	Safety Of Non-Well-Locked Transaction Systems	1986	PODS
7	9,270	On Correctness of Non-serializable Executions	1993	PODS
8	2,132	Transaction Synchronisation In Object Bases	1988	PODS
9	9,277	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD
10	7,479	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR