BugForge: Constructing and Utilizing DBMS Bug Repository to Enhance DBMS Testing

TL;DR

BugForge is a framework that constructs standardized DBMS bug repositories from diverse reports and uses them to generate high-quality test cases, improving automated testing and bug discovery in database systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to build and leverage unified bug repositories for DBMS testing, including techniques for syntax-aware processing and semantic-guided test case refinement.

Findings

Constructed a repository with 37,632 bug reports across four DBMSs.

Uncovered 35 previously unknown bugs, with 22 confirmed by developers.

Enhanced DBMS testing methods like fuzzing and regression testing using the repository.

Abstract

DBMSs are complex systems prone to bugs that may lead to system failures or compromise data integrity. Establishing unified DBMS bug repositories is crucial for systematically organizing bug-related data, enabling code improvement, and supporting automated testing. In particular, bug reports often contain valuable test inputs and bug-triggering clues that help explore rare execution paths and expose critical buggy behavior, thereby guiding automated DBMS testing. However, the heterogeneity of bug reports, along with their incomplete or inaccurate content, makes it challenging to build unified repositories and convert them into high-quality test cases. In this paper, we propose BugForge, a framework that constructs standardized DBMS bug repositories and leverages them to generate high-quality test cases to enhance DBMS testing. Specifically, BugForge progressively collects bug reports, then employs syntax-aware processing and input-adaptive raw PoC extraction to construct a DBMS bug repository. The repository stores structured bug-related data, including bug metadata and raw PoCs that entail potential bug-triggering semantics. These data are further refined into high-quality test cases through semantic-guided adaptation, thereby enabling enhanced DBMS testing methods, including DBMS fuzzing, regression testing, and cross-DBMS bug discovery. We implemented BugForge for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and MonetDB, totally integrated 37,632 bug reports spanning up to 28 years. Based on the repository, BugForge uncovered 35 previously unknown bugs with 22 confirmed by developers, demonstrating the value of constructing and utilizing bug repositories for DBMS testing.