Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation (Extended Version)

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cai, Zhiheng, Liu, Si, Wei, Hengfeng, Chen, Yuxing, Pan, Anqun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Cai, Zhiheng
Liu, Si
Wei, Hengfeng
Chen, Yuxing
Pan, Anqun
author_facet Cai, Zhiheng
Liu, Si
Wei, Hengfeng
Chen, Yuxing
Pan, Anqun
contents Strong isolation guarantees, such as serializability and snapshot isolation, are essential for maintaining data consistency and integrity in modern databases. Verifying whether a database upholds its claimed guarantees is increasingly critical, as these guarantees form a contract between the vendor and its users. However, this task is challenging, particularly in black-box settings, where only observable system behavior is available and often involves uncertain dependencies between transactions. In this paper, we present VeriStrong, a fast verifier for strong database isolation. At its core is a novel formalism called hyper-polygraphs, which compactly captures both certain and uncertain transactional dependencies in database executions. Leveraging this formalism, we develop sound and complete encodings for verifying both serializability and snapshot isolation. To achieve high efficiency, VeriStrong tailors SMT solving to the characteristics of database workloads, in contrast to prior general-purpose approaches. Our extensive evaluation across diverse benchmarks shows that VeriStrong not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art verifiers on the workloads they support, but also scales to large, general workloads beyond their reach, while maintaining high accuracy in detecting isolation anomalies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation (Extended Version)
Cai, Zhiheng
Liu, Si
Wei, Hengfeng
Chen, Yuxing
Pan, Anqun
Databases
Strong isolation guarantees, such as serializability and snapshot isolation, are essential for maintaining data consistency and integrity in modern databases. Verifying whether a database upholds its claimed guarantees is increasingly critical, as these guarantees form a contract between the vendor and its users. However, this task is challenging, particularly in black-box settings, where only observable system behavior is available and often involves uncertain dependencies between transactions. In this paper, we present VeriStrong, a fast verifier for strong database isolation. At its core is a novel formalism called hyper-polygraphs, which compactly captures both certain and uncertain transactional dependencies in database executions. Leveraging this formalism, we develop sound and complete encodings for verifying both serializability and snapshot isolation. To achieve high efficiency, VeriStrong tailors SMT solving to the characteristics of database workloads, in contrast to prior general-purpose approaches. Our extensive evaluation across diverse benchmarks shows that VeriStrong not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art verifiers on the workloads they support, but also scales to large, general workloads beyond their reach, while maintaining high accuracy in detecting isolation anomalies.
title Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation (Extended Version)
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14067