MonkeyDB: effectively testing correctness under weak isolation levels

Biswas, Ranadeep and Kakwani, Diptanshu and Vedurada, Jyothi and et al, . (2021) MonkeyDB: effectively testing correctness under weak isolation levels. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 5 (OOPSLA). pp. 1-27. ISSN 2475-1421

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Abstract

Modern applications, such as social networking systems and e-commerce platforms are centered around using large-scale storage systems for storing and retrieving data. In the presence of concurrent accesses, these storage systems trade off isolation for performance. The weaker the isolation level, the more behaviors a storage system is allowed to exhibit and it is up to the developer to ensure that their application can tolerate those behaviors. However, these weak behaviors only occur rarely in practice and outside the control of the application, making it difficult for developers to test the robustness of their code against weak isolation levels. This paper presents MonkeyDB, a mock storage system for testing storage-backed applications. MonkeyDB supports a key-value interface as well as SQL queries under multiple isolation levels. It uses a logical specification of the isolation level to compute, on a read operation, the set of all possible return values. MonkeyDB then returns a value randomly from this set. We show that MonkeyDB provides good coverage of weak behaviors, which is complete in the limit. We test a variety of applications for assertions that fail only under weak isolation. MonkeyDB is able to break each of those assertions in a small number of attempts. © 2021 Owner/Author.

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IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Vedurada, Jyothi	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5911-6011

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

This work is supported in part by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 678177).

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Applications of Storage Systems; Testing; Transactional Databases; Weak Isolation Levels

Subjects:

Computer science

Divisions:

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Depositing User:

. LibTrainee 2021

Date Deposited:

09 Sep 2022 05:28

Last Modified:

09 Sep 2022 05:28