A/D Case: A New Heart for Fd3

Abstract

In (Enciso and Mora, 2002) we introduce the Functional Dependencies Data Dictionary (F D3) as an architecture to facilitate the integration of database Systems. We propose the use of logics based on the notion of Functional Dependencies (FD) to allows formal specification of the objects of a data model and to conceive future automated treatment. The existence of a FD logic provides a formal language suitable to carry out integration tasks and eases the design of an automatic integration process based in the axiomatic system of the FD logic. Besides that, F D3, provides a High Level Functional Dependencies (HLFD) Data Model which is used in a similar way as the Entity/Relationship Model. In this paper, we develop a CASE tool named A/D CASE (Attribute/Dependence CASE) that illustrates the practical benefits of the F D3 architecture. In the development of A/D CASE we have taken into account other theoretical results which improve our original F D3 proposal (Enciso and Mora, 2002). Particularly: • A new functional dependencies logic named SL F D for removing redundancy in a database sub-model that we present in (Mora, 2002; Cordero et al., 2002a). The use of SL F D add formalization to software engineering process. • An efficient preprocessing transformation based on the substitution paradigm that we present in (Mora et al., 2003). Unlike A/D CASE is independent from the Relational Model, it can be integrated into different database systems and it is compatible with relational DBMSs.