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Autori principali: Barros, Manuel, Cunha, Alcino, Pereira, Jose, Kang, Eunsuk
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00159
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author Barros, Manuel
Cunha, Alcino
Pereira, Jose
Kang, Eunsuk
author_facet Barros, Manuel
Cunha, Alcino
Pereira, Jose
Kang, Eunsuk
contents Most databases can be configured to operate under isolation levels weaker than serializability. These enforce fewer restrictions on the concurrent access to data and consequently allow for more performant implementations. While formal frameworks for rigorously specifying isolation levels exist, reasoning about the semantic differences between specifications remains notoriously difficult. This paper proposes a tool -- Isolde -- that can automatically generate examples that are allowed by an isolation level but disallowed by another. This simple primitive unlocks a range of useful reasoning tasks, including checking equivalence between definitions, and verifying (by refutation) subtle semantic properties of isolation levels. For example, Isolde allowed us to easily and automatically reproduce a famously elusive result from the literature and to discover a previously unknown bug in the alternative specification of a standard isolation level used in a state-of-the-art isolation checker.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00159
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning about Transactional Isolation Levels with Isolde
Barros, Manuel
Cunha, Alcino
Pereira, Jose
Kang, Eunsuk
Databases
Most databases can be configured to operate under isolation levels weaker than serializability. These enforce fewer restrictions on the concurrent access to data and consequently allow for more performant implementations. While formal frameworks for rigorously specifying isolation levels exist, reasoning about the semantic differences between specifications remains notoriously difficult. This paper proposes a tool -- Isolde -- that can automatically generate examples that are allowed by an isolation level but disallowed by another. This simple primitive unlocks a range of useful reasoning tasks, including checking equivalence between definitions, and verifying (by refutation) subtle semantic properties of isolation levels. For example, Isolde allowed us to easily and automatically reproduce a famously elusive result from the literature and to discover a previously unknown bug in the alternative specification of a standard isolation level used in a state-of-the-art isolation checker.
title Reasoning about Transactional Isolation Levels with Isolde
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00159