PL / SQL Advisor : a Static Analysis-based Tool to Suggest Improvements for Stored Procedures

Abstract

Stored procedures are commonly used to provide access and manipulation ofdatabase data for information systems and other applications. If procedures present inefficient programming logic or data manipulation, excessive delays are provided to the client applications. Such delays can cause, among other problems, expressive financial losses to enterprises. In additon, if procedures are developed using bad programming practices, they may become complex to maintain and evolve. In general, attempts to minimize these problems using manual analysis of source code are labor- and time-consuming. In this work, we present PL/SQL Advisor, a static analysis-based tool, which automatically detects potential improvements on database stored procedures written in PL/SQL. The results ofa case study, using real open source projects, show that our tool is able to suggest a reasonable amount ofcode improvements with low cost.