Semantic Conformance Testing of Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS implementations are expected to adhere to SQL standards. However, there are currently no tools available that can automatically verify this conformance. The main reasons are twofold. First, the SQL standard specification, documented in natural language, tends to be ambiguous and is not directly executable. Second, it is difficult to generate test queries that thoroughly cover all aspects, e.g., keywords and parameters, defined in the SQL specification. In this work, we introduce the first method for semantic conformance testing of RDBMSs. Our contributions are threefold. Firstly, we formally define the denotational semantics of SQL and implement them in Prolog, creating an executable reference RDBMS for differential testing against existing RDBMSs. Secondly, we propose three coverage criteria based on these formal semantics, along with a coverage-guided query generation algorithm that effectively generates queries achieving high semantic coverage. Lastly, we apply our approach to six widely-used and thoroughly tested RDBMSs, e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL and OceanBase, uncovering 19 bugs and 13 inconsistencies, all of which are confirmed by RDBMS developers.