Serf

Abstract

The age of information management and with it the advent of increasingly sophisticated technologies have kindled a need in the database community and others to re-structure existing systems and move forward to make use of these new technologies. Legacy application systems are being transformed to newer state-of-the-art systems, information sources are being mapped from one data model to another, a diversity of data sources are being transformed to load, cleanse and consolidate data into modern data-warehouses [CR99]. Re-structuring is thus a critical task for a variety of applications. For this reason, most object-oriented database systems (OODB) today support some form of re-structuring support [Tec94, Obj93, BKKK87]. This existing support of current OODBs [BKKK87, Tec94, Obj93] is limited to a pre-defined taxonomy of simple fixed-semantic schema evolution operations. However, such simple changes, typically to individual types only, are not sufficient for many advanced applications [Bré96]. More radical changes, such as combining two types of redefining the relationship between two types, are either very difficult or even impossible to achieve with current commercial database technology [Tec94, Obj93]. In fact, most OODBs would typically require the user to write ad-hoc programs to accomplish such transformations. Research that has begun to look into the issue of complex changes [Bré96, Ler96] is still limited by providing a fixed set of some selected (even if now more complex) operations. To address these limitations of the current restructuring technology, we have proposed the SERF framework which aims at providing a rich environment for doing complex user-defined transformations flexibly , easily and correctly [CJR98b]. The goal of our work is to increase the usability and utility of the SERF framework and its applicability to re-structuring problems beyond OODB evolution. Towards that end, we provide re-usable transformations via the notion of SERF Templates that can be packaged into libraries, thereby increasing the portability of these transformations. We also now have a first cut at providing an assurance of consistency for the users of this system, a semantic optimizer that provides some performance improvements via enhanced query optimization techniques with emphasis on the re-structuring primitives [CNR99]. In this demo we give an overview of the SERF framework, its current status and the enhancements that are planned for the future. We also present an example of the application of SERF to a domain other than schema evolution, i.e., the web restructuring.