An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Database Access Bugs in Java Applications

IF 6.6 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Pub Date : 2024-06-13 DOI:10.1145/3672449

Wei Liu, Shouvick Mondal, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Database-backed applications rely on the database access code to interact with the underlying database management systems (DBMSs). Although many prior studies aim at database access issues like SQL anti-patterns or SQL code smells, there is a lack of study of database access bugs during the maintenance of database-backed applications. In this paper, we empirically investigate 423 database access bugs collected from seven large-scale Java open source applications that use relational database management systems (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL). We study the characteristics (e.g., occurrence and root causes) of the bugs by manually examining the bug reports and commit histories. We find that the number of reported database and non-database access bugs share a similar trend but their modified files in bug fixing commits are different. Additionally, we generalize categories of the root causes of database access bugs, containing five main categories (SQL queries, Schema, API, Configuration, SQL query result) and 25 unique root causes. We find that the bugs pertaining to SQL queries, Schema, and API cover 84.2% of database access bugs across all studied applications. In particular, SQL queries bug (54%) and API bug (38.7%) are the most frequent issues when using JDBC and Hibernate, respectively. Finally, we provide a discussion on the implications of our findings for developers and researchers.

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关于 Java 应用程序中数据库访问错误特点的实证研究

数据库支持的应用程序依靠数据库访问代码与底层数据库管理系统（DBMS）进行交互。尽管之前的许多研究都针对数据库访问问题，如 SQL 反模式或 SQL 代码气味，但缺乏对数据库支持应用程序维护过程中数据库访问错误的研究。在本文中，我们对从七个使用关系数据库管理系统（如 MySQL 或 PostgreSQL）的大型 Java 开源应用程序中收集到的 423 个数据库访问错误进行了实证研究。我们通过人工检查错误报告和提交历史记录来研究错误的特征（如发生率和根本原因）。我们发现，报告的数据库和非数据库访问错误的数量有相似的趋势，但它们在错误修复提交中修改的文件却不同。此外，我们对数据库访问错误的根本原因进行了归纳分类，其中包括五大类（SQL 查询、模式、API、配置、SQL 查询结果）和 25 个独特的根本原因。我们发现，在所有研究的应用程序中，与 SQL 查询、模式和 API 相关的错误占数据库访问错误的 84.2%。其中，SQL 查询错误（54%）和 API 错误（38.7%）分别是使用 JDBC 和 Hibernate 时最常见的问题。最后，我们就研究结果对开发人员和研究人员的影响进行了讨论。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 工程技术-计算机：软件工程

CiteScore

6.30

自引率

4.50%

发文量

164

审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： Designing and building a large, complex software system is a tremendous challenge. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) publishes papers on all aspects of that challenge: specification, design, development and maintenance. It covers tools and methodologies, languages, data structures, and algorithms. TOSEM also reports on successful efforts, noting practical lessons that can be scaled and transferred to other projects, and often looks at applications of innovative technologies. The tone is scholarly but readable; the content is worthy of study; the presentation is effective.