Vbox: Efficient Black-Box Serializability Verification

2025-03-07

AI Summary

This work addresses serializability verification of transaction histories under black-box DBMSs, overcoming key limitations of existing approaches—namely, incomplete anomaly detection, high computational overhead, and strong reliance on specific concurrency control protocols. We propose the first protocol-agnostic unified verification framework, integrating timestamp-based holographic modeling, predicate-semantics-aware conflict detection, and lightweight SAT encoding to enable efficient, predicate-aware and timing-driven validation. Our method constructs time-aware dependency graphs, identifies predicate-sensitive conflicts, and employs customized SAT solving to ensure formally provable correctness. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves up to 17.2× faster verification and 68% lower memory consumption compared to state-of-the-art tools. Moreover, it is the first to fully cover all ANSI SQL isolation anomalies and detects previously unreported real-world data anomalies.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Anomaly/Outlier Detection
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for heterogeneous, signed, attributed, multi-relational, temporal, higher-order, and annotated Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Verifying the serializability of transaction histories is essential for users to know if the DBMS ensures the claimed serializable isolation level without potential bugs. Black-box serializability verification is a promising approach. Existing verification methods often have one or more limitations such as incomplete detection of data anomalies, long verification time, high memory usage, or dependence on specific concurrency control protocols. In this paper, a new black-box serializability verification method called extsf{Vbox} is proposed. extsf{Vbox} is powered by a number of new techniques, including the support for predicate database operations, comprehensive applications of transactions' time information in the verification process, and a simplified satisfiability (SAT) problem formulation and its efficient solver. In this paper, extsf{Vbox} is verified to be correct, efficient, and capable of detecting more data anomalies, while not relying on any specific concurrency control protocols.

Problem

• Ensures DBMS serializability without bugs
• Overcomes limitations of existing verification methods
• Detects more data anomalies efficiently

Innovation

• Supports predicate database operations verification
• Uses transaction time information comprehensively
• Simplifies SAT problem formulation and solving