Understanding and Detecting SQL Function Bugs: Using Simple Boundary Arguments to Trigger Hundreds of DBMS Bugs

Built-in SQL functions are crucial in Database Management Systems (DBMSs), supporting various operations and computations across multiple data types. They are essential for querying, data transformation, and aggregation. Despite their importance, the bugs in SQL functions have caused widespread problems in the real world, from system failures to arbitrary code execution. However, the understanding of the bug characteristics is limited. More importantly, conventional function testing methods struggle to generate semantically correct SQL test cases, while DBMS testing efforts are hard to measure built-in SQL functions.