Ad Hoc Transactions through the Looking Glass: An Empirical Study of Application-Level Transactions in Web Applications

IF 2.2 2区计算机科学 Q3 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS ACM Transactions on Database Systems Pub Date : 2023-12-23 DOI:10.1145/3638553

Zhaoguo Wang, Chuzhe Tang, Xiaodong Zhang, Qianmian Yu, Binyu Zang, Haibing Guan, Haibo Chen

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Abstract

Many transactions in web applications are constructed ad hoc in the application code. For example, developers might explicitly use locking primitives or validation procedures to coordinate critical code fragments. We refer to database operations coordinated by application code as ad hoc transactions. Until now, little is known about them. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on ad hoc transactions. By studying 91 ad hoc transactions among 8 popular open-source web applications, we found that (i) every studied application uses ad hoc transactions (up to 16 per application), 71 of which play critical roles; (ii) compared with database transactions, concurrency control of ad hoc transactions is much more flexible; (iii) ad hoc transactions are error-prone—53 of them have correctness issues, and 33 of them are confirmed by developers; and (iv) ad hoc transactions have the potential for improving performance in contentious workloads by utilizing application semantics such as access patterns. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications of ad hoc transactions to the database research community.

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透过望远镜看特设事务：网络应用程序中应用级事务的实证研究

网络应用程序中的许多事务都是在应用程序代码中临时构建的。例如，开发人员可能会明确使用锁定原语或验证程序来协调关键代码片段。我们将由应用代码协调的数据库操作称为临时事务。到目前为止，人们对它们知之甚少。本文首次对临时事务进行了全面研究。通过研究 8 个流行的开源网络应用程序中的 91 个临时事务，我们发现：(i) 每个研究的应用程序都使用临时事务（每个应用程序多达 16 个），其中 71 个发挥了关键作用；(ii) 与数据库事务相比，临时事务的并发控制要灵活得多；(iii) 临时事务容易出错--其中 53 个存在正确性问题，33 个得到了开发人员的确认；(iv) 临时事务有可能通过利用访问模式等应用程序语义来提高有争议工作负载的性能。基于这些发现，我们讨论了临时事务对数据库研究界的影响。

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来源期刊

ACM Transactions on Database Systems 工程技术-计算机：软件工程

CiteScore

5.60

自引率

0.00%

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审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： Heavily used in both academic and corporate R&D settings, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) is a key publication for computer scientists working in data abstraction, data modeling, and designing data management systems. Topics include storage and retrieval, transaction management, distributed and federated databases, semantics of data, intelligent databases, and operations and algorithms relating to these areas. In this rapidly changing field, TODS provides insights into the thoughts of the best minds in database R&D.

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