Plume: Efficient and Complete Black-Box Checking of Weak Isolation Levels

Abstract

Modern databases embrace weak isolation levels to cater for highly available transactions. However, weak isolation bugs have recently manifested in many production databases. This raises the concern of whether database implementations actually deliver their promised isolation guarantees in practice. In this paper we present Plume, the first efficient, complete, black-box checker for weak isolation levels. Plume builds on modular, fine-grained, transactional anomalous patterns, with which we establish sound and complete characterizations of representative weak isolation levels, including read committed, read atomicity, and transactional causal consistency. Plume leverages a novel combination of two techniques, vectors and tree clocks, to accelerate isolation checking. Our extensive assessment shows that Plume can reproduce all known violations in a large collection of anomalous database execution histories, detect new isolation bugs in three production databases along with informative counterexamples, find more weak isolation anomalies than the state-of-the-art checkers, and efficiently validate isolation guarantees under a wide variety of workloads.