A Repository based approach to Data Reverse Engineering

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, 2010

At the state of the art, objects oriented applications use data structured in relational databases by exploiting some patterns, like the Domain Model and Data Mapper. These approaches aim to represent data in the OO way, using objects for representing data entities. Furthermore, we point out that the identification of these patterns can show the link between the object model and the conceptual entities, exploiting their associations to the physical data objects. The aim of this paper is to present a unified perspective for the definition of an integrated approach for software and data reverse engineering. The discussion is carried out by means of a sample application and a comparison with results from current tools.

2000

Abstract The reverse engineering research community has been investigating mechanisms for exchanging data and partial results between reverse engineering tools (Woods et al., 1998; Holt et al., 2000). Among the many subproblems inherent in implementing a standard exchange format (SEF) is the design of schemas that represent views of source code at various levels of abstraction.

1999

Database reverse engineering (DBRE) methods recover conceptual data models from physical databases. The bottom-up nature of these methods imposes two major limitations. First, they do not provide an initial high level abstract schema suitable for use as a basis for reasoning about the application domain: a single detailed schema is only produced at the very end of the project. Second, they provide no support for a divide-and-conquer approach: the entire database schema must be analysed and processed as a unit, and cannot be divided into smaller database schemas. We present a simple solution to overcome both limitations. In our proposal, relations are grouped based on their primary keys. Each group can be perceived in two ways as a relational schema that can be reversed engineered as a standalone DBRE project; and as an element, either an entity or a relationship, of a high-level abstract schema that provides initial insight about the application domain. We also present examples from actual large database systems

Object-Oriented and Entity-Relationship Modelling/International Conference on Conceptual Modeling / the Entity Relationship Approach, 1999

Database reverse engineering is a complex activity that can be modeled as a sequence of two major processes, namely data structure extraction and data structure conceptualization. The first process consists in reconstructing the logical - that is, DBMS-dependent - schema, while the second process derives the conceptual specification of the data from this logical schema. This paper concentrates on the

The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, 2010

The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of components making up a web application, the lack of effective programming mechanisms for implementing basic software engineering principles in it, and undisciplined development processes induced by the high pressure of a very short time-to-market, make web application maintenance a challenging problem. A relevant issue consists of reusing the methodological and technological experience in the sector of traditional software maintenance, and exploring the opportunity of using reverse engineering to support effective web application maintenance. This paper presents reverse engineering approach that help to understand existing undocumented web applications to be maintained or evolved, through the extraction from domain ontology of conceptual schema describing a web application. The advantage of using ontology for conceptual data modelling is the reusability of domain knowledge. As a result of it the conceptual data model will be made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating conceptual data model in usual way. We demonstrate the value of the approach by providing an implementation that exhibits appropriate characteristics.

2008

One important problem in today organizations is the existence of non-integrated information systems, inconsistency and lack of suitable correlations between legacy and modern systems. One main solution is to transfer the local databases into a global one. In this regards we need to extract the data structures from the legacy systems and integrate them with the new technology systems. In legacy systems, huge amounts of a data are stored in legacy databases. They require particular attention since they need more efforts to be normalized, reformatted and moved to the modern database environments. Designing the new integrated (global) database architecture and applying the reverse engineering requires data normalization. This paper proposes the use of database reverse engineering in order to integrate legacy and modern databases in organizations. The suggested approach consists of methods and techniques for generating data transformation rules needed for the data structure normalization.

… Engineering, 1996., …, 1996

Recovering the semantic description of file and database structures is an important aspect of business application reverse engineering. It includes a particularly delicate activity, namely data structure extraction, i.e. finding the exact data structures and integrity constraints of the database. This process is made more complex than generally expected due to the fact that these structures and constraints often are not explicitly defined, but are translated into implicit constructs, controlled and managed through procedural code or user interface protocol for instance. This paper describes the problem of implicit structure elicitation. It proposes an analysis of this phenomenon, and of the techniques and heuristics that can be used in the elicitation process. It develops a set of efficient techniques and a strategy for the elicitation of one of the most common implicit construct, namely the foreign key. The paper also explains how DB-MAIN, a general-purpose database reverse engineering CASE tool, can help analysts elicit implicit constructs, and specifically foreign keys.

Proceedings of the Fourth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

This paper presents a generic methodology for database reverse engineering comprising two main steps, namely Data structure extraction and Data structure conceptualization. The first process tries to elicit the physical data structures of the database, while the second one tries to recover the semantics of these structures. This methodology is illustrated by a small, but non-trivial, example through which a set of COBOL files is transformed into a relational database.

2009

Reverse engineering applied to databases permits to extract a conceptual schema that represents, at a higher level of abstraction, the database implementation. This resulting conceptual schema may be used to facilitate, among others, system maintenance, evolution and reuse. In the last years, the use of object-relational constructs was incorporated into database development. However, reverse engineering techniques for these specific constructs have not been yet provided. In this sense, the main goal of this paper is to present a method that considers these new constructs in the reverse engineering of an existing object-relational database. As a result of the process, our method returns an equivalent conceptual schema specified in UML (extended with a set of OCL integrity constraints) that represents, at a conceptual level, the database schema. We provide a prototype tool that implements our method for the Oracle9i database management system. context Checkpoint inv: Checkpoint.allInstances->isUnique(id) context Person inv: self.age > 10 context Person inv: Person.allInstances->isUnique(name) context Address inv: self.floor->size()<=10 self.town->size() <= 30 context Address inv: self.floor->size() <= 10 context Address inv: self.street->size() <= 40 3 Obtained CS

Colloque sur l'Optimisation et les Systèmes d'Information-COSI'2009, 2009

Extracting Conceptual Schema From Domain Ontology: A Web Application Reverse-Engineering Approach