Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems

Summary: Propose write-specific serializability: a schedule is correct if its final DB state equals some serial schedule's. WriteCheck, a lightweight final-state tester, found 22 violations (11 new critical bugs) across six production DBMSs, showing simple tests catch many transaction bugs. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h9985cf35e411099b
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.0851868e-05
Overall Rank: 10,065 | 32.36%
DOI: 10.14778/3742728.3742747
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ziyu Cui (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
2. Wensheng Dou (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
3. Yu Gao (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
4. Rui Yang (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
5. Yingying Zheng (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
6. Jiansen Song (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
7. Yuan Feng (Wuhan Dameng Database Co., Ltd.)
8. Jun Wei (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

BibTeX Citation

@article{cui_vldb25,
        title = {{Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems}},
        author = {Cui, Ziyu and Dou, Wensheng and Gao, Yu and Yang, Rui and Zheng, Yingying and Song, Jiansen and Feng, Yuan and Wei, Jun},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '25},
        volume = {18},
        number = {8},
        pages = {2547--2560},
        doi = {10.14778/3742728.3742747},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3742728.3742747},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,412	Detecting Schema-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Equivalent Database Construction	2025	VLDB	5.1808981e-05
10,444	DBugScribe: Automatic Database Bug Reproduction from Community Reports	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,881	Detecting Data-Type-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Compatible Database Construction	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 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
106	Quickly Generating Billion-Record Synthetic Databases	1994	SIGMOD	0.00033518428
383	Massive Stochastic Testing of SQL	1998	VLDB	0.00019474868
727	Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL	2012	VLDB	0.00014456009
748	QAGen: Generating Query-Aware Test Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00014277246
956	Flexible Database Generators	2005	VLDB	0.0001286031
1,102	Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations	2021	VLDB	0.00011999358
1,194	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011581268
1,335	TicToc: Time Traveling Optimistic Concurrency Control	2016	SIGMOD	0.00010991964
1,604	Simple and Realistic Data Generation	2006	VLDB	0.00010096875
1,832	APOLLO: Automatic Detection and Diagnosis of Performance Regressions in Database Systems	2020	VLDB	9.5385854e-05
1,948	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.3202419e-05
3,652	Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans	2024	SIGMOD	7.1293371e-05
3,937	Testing Graph Database Systems via Graph-Aware Metamorphic Relations	2024	VLDB	6.9130095e-05
5,058	Detecting Metadata-Related Logic Bugs in Database Systems via Raw Database Construction	2024	VLDB	6.2915045e-05
5,527	Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly	2022	SIGMOD	6.0913798e-05
9,412	Detecting Schema-Related Logic Bugs in Relational DBMSs via Equivalent Database Construction	2025	VLDB	5.1808981e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	13,317	Relative Serializability: An Approach for Relaxing the Atomicity of Transactions	1994	PODS
2	7,484	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR
3	9,203	Tolerating Bounded Inconsistency for Increasing Concurrency in Database Systems	1992	PODS
4	237	Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases	2008	SIGMOD
5	2,490	Formal Model of Correctness Without Serializability	1988	SIGMOD
6	10,140	Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates	2021	VLDB
7	13,505	A semantic approach to correctness of concurrent transaction executions	1985	PODS
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9	1,072	High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility	2017	VLDB
10	9,280	On Correctness of Non-serializable Executions	1993	PODS