SPLASH 2025
Sun 12 - Sat 18 October 2025 Singapore
co-located with ICFP/SPLASH 2025
Thu 16 Oct 2025 14:00 - 14:15 at Orchid West - Reasoning Chair(s): Adam Chlipala

Clients rely on database systems to be correct, which requires the system not only to implement transactions’ semantics correctly but also to provide isolation guarantees for the transactions. This paper presents a client-centric technique for checking both semantic correctness and isolation-level guarantees for black-box database systems based on observations collected from running transactions on these systems. Our technique verifies observational correctness with respect to a given set of transactions and observations for them, which holds iff there exists a possible correct execution of the transactions under a given isolation level that could result in these observations. Our technique relies on novel symbolic encodings of (1) the semantic correctness of database transactions in the presence of weak isolation and (2) isolation-level guarantees. These are used by the checker to query a Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver. We applied our tool Troubadour to verify observational correctness of several database systems, including PostgreSQL and a system under development at the large tech company Company, in which the tool helped detect two new bugs. We also demonstrate that Troubadour is able to find known semantic correctness bugs and detect isolation-related anomalies.

Thu 16 Oct

Displayed time zone: Perth change

13:45 - 15:30
ReasoningOOPSLA at Orchid West
Chair(s): Adam Chlipala Massachusetts Institute of Technology
13:45
15m
Talk
Characterizing Implementability of Global Protocols with Infinite States and Data
OOPSLA
Elaine Li NYU, Felix Stutz University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Thomas Wies New York University, Damien Zufferey SonarSource
14:00
15m
Talk
Checking Observational Correctness of Database Systems
OOPSLA
Lauren Pick The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Amanda Xu University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ankush Desai Amazon Web Services, Sanjit A. Seshia University of California, Berkeley, Aws Albarghouthi University of Wisconsin-Madison
14:15
15m
Talk
Correct Black-Box Monitors for Distributed Deadlock Detection: Formalisation and Implementation
OOPSLA
Radosław Jan Rowicki Technical University of Denmark, Adrian Francalanza University of Malta, Alceste Scalas Technical University of Denmark
DOI Pre-print
14:30
15m
Talk
Correct-By-Construction: Certified Individual Fairness through Neural Network Training
OOPSLA
Ruihan Zhang Singapore Management University (SMU), Jun Sun Singapore Management University
14:45
15m
Talk
Modular Reasoning about Global Variables and Their Initialization
OOPSLA
João Pereira ETH Zurich, Isaac van Bakel ETH Zurich, Patricia Firlejczyk ETH Zurich, Marco Eilers ETH Zurich, Peter Müller ETH Zurich
15:00
15m
Talk
P³: Reasoning about Patches via Product Programs
OOPSLA
Arindam Sharma Imperial College London, Daniel Schemmel Imperial College London, Cristian Cadar Imperial College London
15:15
15m
Talk
Reasoning about External Calls
OOPSLA
Julian Mackay Kry10 Ltd, Sophia Drossopoulou Imperial College London, James Noble Independent. Wellington, NZ, Susan Eisenbach Imperial College London
Link to publication DOI Pre-print