CSE researchers win Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2024

Researchers in CSE have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) for their paper titled “VeriEQL: Bounded Equivalence Verification for Complex SQL Queries with Integrity Constraints.” CSE authors on the paper include Prof. Xinyu Wang and PhD student Pinhan Zhao, along with their collaborators Yang He and Yuepeng Wang from Simon Fraser University.

OOPSLA is a prestigious international conference in the field of programming languages and systems, attracting research from leading experts and practitioners worldwide. This year, from among 148 accepted papers, only seven were selected to receive the Distinguished Paper Award based on nominations by research committee members and final reviews.

Wang and Zhao’s paper introduces VeriEQL, a new tool designed to verify the equivalence of SQL database queries—commands used to interact with databases, such as retrieving data or updating records. VeriEQL checks if two queries that may look different produce the same results, which is essential for optimizing database performance and ensuring query correctness.

VeriEQL excels in analyzing advanced SQL features like sorting and case statements, as well as integrity constraints that ensure the data adheres to certain rules. Unlike existing tools, it can handle a much wider range of queries and constraints, making it highly practical in a variety of applications.

“One challenge in verifying SQL queries is handling their complexity and various constraints on the data,” said Wang. “To the best of our knowledge, VeriEQL is the first solution that supports complex SQL queries with such rich integrity constraints.”

The researchers tested VeriEQL on over 20,000 different database queries, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques in both proving query equivalence and finding discrepancies.

“This approach not only proves or disproves query equivalence with unmatched efficiency but also generates counterexamples that can uncover significant bugs in major systems like MySQL and Apache Calcite,” Zhao explained.

Through their innovative work, the authors address a vital need for more efficient and accurate tools in SQL query verification, providing a robust solution to improve the reliability and correctness of database applications in real-world scenarios.

“The success of VeriEQL highlights the importance of developing advanced verification techniques to keep pace with the complexity of modern SQL queries,” Wang added.