A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels
Summary: ANSI SQL-92 isolation levels critiqued: phenomena-based criteria and locking semantics mischaracterize common levels. Investigates ambiguity, formalizes phenomena, introduces new ones, and defines Snapshot Isolation as a central multiversion isolation type. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Hal Berenson (Microsoft)
- 2. Phil Bernstein (Microsoft)
- 3. Jim Gray (University of California Berkeley)
- 4. Jim Melton (Sybase)
- 5. Elizabeth O'Neil (University of Massachusetts Boston)
- 6. Patrick O'Neil (University of Massachusetts Boston)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{berenson_sigmod95,
title = {{A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels}},
author = {Berenson, Hal and Bernstein, Phil and Gray, Jim and Melton, Jim and O'Neil, Elizabeth and O'Neil, Patrick},
series = {{SIGMOD} '95},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/223784.223785},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/223784.223785},
year = {1995}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 50 of 139 citing papers.
Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 101 | The Design of the POSTGRES Storage System | 1987 | VLDB | 0.00033939695 |
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