Object Recovery from Relational Tables

摘要

In this paper, we introduce a general approach to solve common problems related to database reverse engineering processes. We focus on relational databases source schemas and try to extract hidden structures in order to construct a new generic model that benefits from both object and relational concepts. Two major problems occurs with existing reverse engineering approaches for this schema mapping: the first one concerns the extensive amount of information that must be gathered either automatically or from users (designers), the second one is the actual state of legacy databases. The underlying idea is to extract from legacy databases, an intermediate schema that involves both relations and objects structures. The first section of the paper introduces the problem of legacy databases maintenance, then the second section presents real-life databases and why they are different from theoretic and academic cases. Section 3 is devoted to the presentation of the EXoRE approach. Finally section 4 presents a conclusion and research perspective for future work.