Testing Database-Centric Applications for Causes of Database Deadlocks

Many organizations deploy applications that use databases by sending Structured Query Language (SQL) statements to them and obtaining data that result from executions of these statements. Since applications often share the same databases concurrently, database deadlocks routinely occur in these databases. Testing applications to determine how they cause database deadlocks is important as part of ensuring correctness, reliability, and performance of these applications. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to reproduce database deadlocks, since it involves different factors such as the precise interleavings in executing SQL statements. We created a novel approach for Systematic TEsting in Presence of Database Deadlocks (STEPDAD) that enables testers to instantiate database deadlocks in applications with a high level of automation and frequency. We implemented STEPDAD and experimented with three applications. On average, STEPDAD detected a number of database deadlocks exceeding the deadlocks obtained with the baseline approach by more than an order of magnitude. In some cases, STEPDAD reproduced a database deadlock after running an application only twice, while no database deadlocks could be obtained after ten runs using the baseline approach.