Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases
Summary: Study of 93 real-world concurrency bugs in database applications finds developers prefer preventing bugs, but databases (commonly using weaker isolation like READ COMMITTED) provide inadequate support, leading to ad-hoc, complex, and often incorrect fixes. Paper diagnoses root causes and sketches research opportunities to rethink concurrency control and better align DB guarantees with developer workflows. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Chaoyi Cheng (Ohio State University; University of Pennsylvania)
- 2. Mingzhe Han (Ohio State University)
- 3. Nuo Xu (Ohio State University; University of Southern California)
- 4. Spyros Blanas (Ohio State University)
- 5. Michael D. Bond (Ohio State University)
- 6. Yang Wang (Ohio State University)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{cheng_cidr23,
address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
series = {{CIDR} '23},
title = {{Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
author = {Cheng, Chaoyi and Han, Mingzhe and Xu, Nuo and Blanas, Spyros and Bond, Michael D. and Wang, Yang},
year = {2023}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7,735 | Scalable and Robust Snapshot Isolation for High-Performance Storage Engines | 2023 | VLDB | 5.4631389e-05 |
| 9,277 | Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads? | 2025 | SIGMOD | 5.2042355e-05 |
| 9,953 | Hermes: Off-the-Shelf Real-Time Transactional Analytics | 2025 | VLDB | 5.1038322e-05 |
| 11,078 | Transactional Cloud Applications Go with the (Data)Flow | 2025 | CIDR | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 11,199 | Styx: Transactional Stateful Functions on Streaming Dataflows | 2025 | SIGMOD | 4.9793485e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,102 | Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations | 2021 | VLDB | 0.00012004972 |
| 2,075 | Automating the Detection of Snapshot Isolation Anomalies | 2007 | VLDB | 9.0795726e-05 |
| 2,077 | ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications | 2017 | SIGMOD | 9.0781571e-05 |
| 2,394 | What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research | 2017 | SIGMOD | 8.5295579e-05 |
| 3,265 | BCC: Reducing False Aborts in Optimistic Concurrency Control with Low Cost for In-Memory Databases | 2016 | VLDB | 7.4784142e-05 |
| 5,524 | Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | 2022 | SIGMOD | 6.0941977e-05 |
| 7,567 | Database Isolation By Scheduling | 2021 | VLDB | 5.4949954e-05 |
| 11,913 | IsoBugView: Interactively Debugging Isolation Bugs in Database Applications | 2022 | VLDB | 4.9793485e-05 |
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Semantically Similar Papers
| # | Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 237 | Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases | 2008 | SIGMOD |
| 2 | 8,149 | Parallelism and Concurrency Control Performance in Distributed Database Machines | 1989 | SIGMOD |
| 3 | 2,132 | Transaction Synchronisation In Object Bases | 1988 | PODS |
| 4 | 7,572 | The Concurrency Control Problem in Multidatabases: Characteristics and Solutions | 1992 | SIGMOD |
| 5 | 12,379 | The Case for Invariant-Based Concurrency Control | 2015 | CIDR |
| 6 | 9,194 | Tolerating Bounded Inconsistency for Increasing Concurrency in Database Systems | 1992 | PODS |
| 7 | 7,132 | Consistency, Concurrency, And Crash Recovery | 1978 | SIGMOD |
| 8 | 14,723 | Concurrency Control In Multilevel-Secure Databases Based On Replicated Architecture | 1990 | SIGMOD |
| 9 | 268 | Models for Studying Concurrency Control Performance: Alternatives and Implications | 1985 | SIGMOD |
| 10 | 2,394 | What Are We Doing With Our Lives? Nobody Cares About Our Concurrency Control Research | 2017 | SIGMOD |