Re-engineering relational databases

Abstract

This paper surveys the recent literature about various research trends relevant to Relational DataBase (RDB) reengineering. The paper presents an analysis of approaches and techniques used in this context, including construction of object views on top of RDBs, database integration and database migration. A categorisation is presented of the selected work, concentrating on migrating an RDB as a source into object-based and XML databases as targets. Database migration from the source into each of the targets is discussed and critically evaluated, including the semantic enrichment, schema translation and data conversion. Based on a detailed analysis of the existing literature, it seems that the existing work does not provide a complete solution for more than one target database for either schema or data conversion. Besides, none of the existing proposals can be considered as a method for migrating an RDB into an objectrelational database. We propose such a method based on an intermediate canonical data model, which enriches the semantics of the source RDB and captures characteristics of the target databases.

Supporting the adaptation of open‐source database applications through extracting data lifecycles

“…Premerlani et al [10] used object-oriented models to recover data models from RDBMS, which can only capture the knowledge from database schemas with no automatic tools. Maatuk et al [11] proposed a method to express ER model in intermediate XML data model, which can be transformed into multiple targets in order to facilitate data Table Select Update Insert Delete Category std_cost wo_requirements T F F T undefined workcentres inactive T F F T undefined www.ietdl.org migration. Malpani et al [12] proposed database reverse engineering to generate conceptual model from DBMS for use in development.…”

Performance evaluation of an RDB and an ORDB: A comparative study using the BUCKY benchmark

“…The advantages provided by these technologies and the dominance of traditional relational databases (RDBs) and their weaknesses in handling data of a complex nature have motivated a growing trend of migrating RDBs into ORDBs instead of designing them from scratch. Database migration is concerned with the process of converting schema and data from a source RDB, as a one-time conversion, into a target database to be managed and handled in its new environment [2,14]. The target database may be accessed through the concepts of its data models with a reduced overhead in term of performance compared to an existing RDB.…”