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research article

Deciding Robustness for Lower SQL Isolation Levels

Ketsman, Bas  
•
Koch, Christoph  
•
Neven, Frank
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December 1, 2022
Acm Transactions On Database Systems

While serializability always guarantees application correctness, lower isolation levels can be chosen to improve transaction throughput at the risk of introducing certain anomalies. A set of transactions is robust against a given isolation level if every possible interleaving of the transactions under the specified isolation level is serializable. Robustness therefore always guarantees application correctness with the performance benefit of the lower isolation level. While the robustness problem has received considerable attention in the literature, only sufficient conditions have been obtained. The most notable exception is the seminal work by Fekete where he obtained a characterization for deciding robustness against SNAPSHOT ISOLATION. In this article, we address the robustness problem for the lower SQL isolation levels READ UNCOMMITTED and READ COMMITTED, which are defined in terms of the forbidden dirty write and dirty read patterns. The first main contribution of this article is that we characterize robustness against both isolation levels in terms of the absence of counter-example schedules of a specific form (split and multi-split schedules) and by the absence of cycles in interference graphs that satisfy various properties. A critical difference with Fekete's work, is that the properties of cycles obtained in this article have to take the relative ordering of operations within transactions into account as READ UNCOMMITTED and READ COMMITTED do not satisfy the atomic visibility requirement. A particular consequence is that the latter renders the robustness problem against READ COMMITTED coNP-complete. The second main contribution of this article is the coNP-hardness proof. For READ UNCOMMITTED, we obtain LOGSPACE-completeness.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/3561049
Web of Science ID

WOS:000910164500001

Author(s)
Ketsman, Bas  
Koch, Christoph  
Neven, Frank
Vandevoort, Brecht
Date Issued

2022-12-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Published in
Acm Transactions On Database Systems
Volume

47

Issue

4

Start page

13

Subjects

Computer Science, Information Systems

•

Computer Science, Software Engineering

•

Computer Science

•

concurrency control

•

sql isolation levels

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DATA  
Available on Infoscience
February 13, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/194800
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