Relational database reverse engineering using the Rigi system
Date
2002
Authors
Du, Ming
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Abstract
Data Base Reverse Engineering (DBRE) is a process of recovering or reconstructing the functional and technical specifications of databases. More precisely, it is a process to recover the schemas that are the results of a database design process. It mainly starts from the source code, such as SQL, of the database application program. Recovering these specifications generally helps to re-document, convert, restructure, maintain, migrate, or extend the legacy databases. The problem is extremely complex for old and ill-designed databases, because there is usually no documentation that can be relied upon and the lack of systematic methodologies for designing and maintaining the databases has led to tricky and obscure code. Therefore, DBRE has long been recognized as a complex, tedious and prone-to-failure activity.
Various computer-aided DBRE tools have been developed to reduce the complexity of this task. However, a major limitation of current approaches is that they cannot represent database schemas and database structure simultaneously. In this thesis, we propose an approach that can visualize database structure and schema concurrently. The approach is built on the current version of the Rigi system, a popular reverse engineering tool. The contribution of this thesis is that Rigi is extended to a useful DBRE tool. It can be used to extract and represent database design information.