Seminars

Title: Managing structural and behavioral evolution in relational database: Application of Software Engineering techniques.
Abstract:

Relational databases play a central role in many information systems.
Their schemas usually contain structural and behavioral entity descriptions.
However, as any piece of software, they must continuously evolve to adapt to new
requirements of a world in constant change. From an evolution point of view,
problems are twofold: (1) relational database management systems do not allow
inconsistencies i.e., no entity can reference a non existing entity; (2) stored
procedures bodies are not described by meta-data i.e., DBMS as PostgreSQL
consider stored procedure bodies as plain text and references to entities are
unknown. As a consequence, evaluating the impact of an evolution of the database
schema is a difficult task. In this seminar, we present a semi-automatic
approach based on recommendations (sort of nested code transformations).
Recommendations are proposed to architects who select the ones fitting their
needs. Selected recommendations are then analysed and compiled to generate SQL
script respecting the constraints imposed by the RDBMS. To support
recommendations, we designed a meta-model for relational databases easing
computation of change impact. We performed an experiment to validate the
approach by reproducing a real evolution on a database. The results of our
experiment show that our approach is able to reproduce exactly a manual
modification in 75% less time.


Zoom link: univ-lille-fr.zoom.us/j/95419000064