From spreadsheets to relational databases and back

摘要

This paper presents techniques and tools to transform spreadsheets into relational databases and back. A set of data refinement rules is introduced to map a tabular datatype into a relational database schema. Having expressed the transformation of the two data models as data refinements, we obtain for free the functions that migrate the data. We use well-known relational database techniques to optimize and query the data. Because data refinements define bi-directional transformations we can map such database back to an optimized spreadsheet. We have implemented the data refinement rules and we constructed Haskell-based tools to manipulate, optimize and refactor Excel-like spreadsheets.