Speaker: Jason Qiu
When: June 14, 2023, 11:00 - 12:00
Where: LB 01.170 Timmanzaal (Building 36), Hybrid

Abstract:

Distributed databases often struggle to fulfill their transactional isolation guarantees due to sharding and replication. As a result, the problem of checking isolation levels is consistently receiving attention from academia and industries. Transactional dependency graphs form a useful abstraction to analyze the transactions’ dependencies and check for isolation anomalies using graph-based anti-patterns. Graph databases, known for their efficiency and convenience in graph representations and analytics, offer a promising approach for implementing isolation level checkers. In this work, we present a novel implementation using ArangoDB, a popular graph database. We collect execution histories from ArangoDB, operating in both single-instance and cluster modes, and transform them into a labeled property model for storage in the graph database. We then utilize customized AQL queries to detect isolation levels by identifying anti-patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that our graph-based checker is comprehensive and efficient compared to existing isolation checkers.

The thesis artifact is online at https://github.com/jasonqiu98/GRAIL-artifact/tree/thesis.