TY - CHAP A1 - Scherzinger, Stefanie A1 - de Almeida, Eduardo Cunha A1 - Ickert, Felipe A1 - Del Fabro, Marcos Didonet T1 - On the necessity of model checking NoSQL database schemas when building SaaS applications T2 - Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Testing the Cloud - TTC 2013 N2 - The design of the NoSQL schema has a direct impact on the scalability of web applications. Especially for developers with little experience in NoSQL stores, the risks inherent in poor schema design can be incalculable. Worse yet, the issues will only manifest once the application has been deployed, and the growing user base causes highly concurrent writes. In this paper, we present a model checking approach to reveal scalability bottlenecks in NoSQL schemas. Our approach draws on formal methods from tree automata theory to perform a conservative static analysis on both the schema and the expected write-behavior of users. We demonstrate the impact of schema-inherent bottlenecks for a popular NoSQL store, and show how concurrent writes can ultimately lead to a considerable share of failed transactions. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2489295.2489297 SP - 1 EP - 6 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY ER -