Duplicate-sensitivity Guided Transformation Synthesis for DBMS Correctness Bug Detection

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Duplicate-sensitivity Guided Transformation Synthesis for DBMS 
Correctness Bug Detection "

By

Miss Yushan ZHANG


Abstract

Database Management System (DBMS) plays a core role in modern software 
from mobile apps to online banking. It is critical that DBMS should 
provide correct data to all applications. When the DBMS returns incorrect 
data, a correctness bug is triggered. Current production-level DBMSs still 
suffer from insufficient testing due to the limited hand-written test 
cases. Recently several works proposed to automatically generate many test 
cases with query transformation, a process of generating an equivalent 
query pair and testing a DBMS by checking whether the system returns the 
same result set for both queries. However, all of them still heavily rely 
on manual work to provide a transformation which largely confines their 
exploration of the valid input query space.

This paper introduces duplicate-sensitivity guided transformation 
synthesis which automatically finds new transformations by first 
synthesizing many candidates then filtering the nonequivalent ones. Our 
automated synthesis is achieved by mutating a query while keeping its 
duplicate sensitivity, which is a necessary condition for query 
equivalence. After candidate synthesis, we keep the mutant query which is 
equivalent to the given one by using a query equivalent checker. 
Furthermore, we have implemented our idea in a tool Eqsql and used it to 
test the production-level DBMSs. In two months, we detected in total 30 
newly confirmed and unique bugs in MySQL, TiDB and CynosDB.


Date:  			Thursday, 5 August 2021

Time:			10:00am - 12:00noon

Zoom meeting: 
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/99042743983?pwd=ZFJLODdwenF5REQydGM5T0hBNDVzdz09

Committee Members:	Dr. Charles Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Shuai Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****