Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2025
Congratulations to PhD student Lasse Møldrup and Associate Professor Andreas Pavlogiannis! Their paper AWDIT: An Optimal Weak Database Isolation Tester has received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 46th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2025) - one of the top conferences in programming languages and systems research.
Modern databases are the backbone of everything from financial systems to social media and cloud services. To meet demands for speed and availability, they often rely on weak isolation levels, but these can lead to subtle and serious bugs in data consistency. AWDIT addresses this challenge by introducing the first provably optimal and highly scalable algorithms for testing these weak isolation guarantees.
Compared to existing tools, AWDIT achieves performance improvements - testing is up to 245× faster on large workloads - allowing developers to catch isolation anomalies in databases more efficiently than ever before. With faster and more reliable tools for testing database consistency, AWDIT can help ensure the integrity of critical systems in areas like healthcare, banking, and cloud computing, where data anomalies can have real-world consequences.