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Verifying equivalence of database-driven applications

Authors:

Shuvendu K. Lahiri,

William R. CookAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 2, Issue POPL

Article No.: 56, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/3158144

Published: 27 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of verifying equivalence between a pair of programs that operate over databases with different schemas. This problem is particularly important in the context of web applications, which typically undergo database refactoring either for performance or maintainability reasons. While web applications should have the same externally observable behavior before and after schema migration, there are no existing tools for proving equivalence of such programs. This paper takes a first step towards solving this problem by formalizing the equivalence and refinement checking problems for database-driven applications. We also propose a proof methodology based on the notion of bisimulation invariants over relational algebra with updates and describe a technique for synthesizing such bisimulation invariants. We have implemented the proposed technique in a tool called Mediator for verifying equivalence between database-driven applications written in our intermediate language and evaluate our tool on 21 benchmarks extracted from textbooks and real-world web applications. Our results show that the proposed methodology can successfully verify 20 of these benchmarks.

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Cited By

He YZhao PWang XWang Y(2024)VeriEQL: Bounded Equivalence Verification for Complex SQL Queries with Integrity ConstraintsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498498:OOPSLA1(1071-1099)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649849
Zhang NBahsoon RTziritas NTheodoropoulos G(2024)Knowledge Equivalence in Digital Twins of Intelligent SystemsACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/363530634:1(1-37)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3635306
Yan CLin YHe Y(2023)Predicate Pushdown for Data Science PipelinesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35892811:2(1-28)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
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Index Terms

Verifying equivalence of database-driven applications
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Formal software verification
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Software verification
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
      1. Program verification

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 2, Issue POPL

January 2018

1961 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3177123

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Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 27 December 2017

Published in PACMPL Volume 2, Issue POPL

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649849
Zhang NBahsoon RTziritas NTheodoropoulos G(2024)Knowledge Equivalence in Digital Twins of Intelligent SystemsACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/363530634:1(1-37)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3635306
Yan CLin YHe Y(2023)Predicate Pushdown for Data Science PipelinesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35892811:2(1-28)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589281
Altoyan NBatory D(2023)On Proving the Correctness of Refactoring Class Diagrams of MDE MetamodelsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/354954132:2(1-42)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
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FANDINNO JHANSEN ZLIERLER YLIFSCHITZ VTEMPLE N(2023)External Behavior of a Logic Program and Verification of RefactoringTheory and Practice of Logic Programming10.1017/S1471068423000200(1-15)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2023
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