A structural approach towards the maintenance of database applications

• Published in: Proceedings. International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium, 2004. IDEAS '04 pp. 277 - 282
• Main Authors: Gardikiotis, S.K., Malevris, N., Konstantinou, T.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos CA IEEE 2004; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Application software; Applied sciences; Computer languages; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Data analysis; Environmental economics; Exact sciences and technology; Informatics; Information analysis; Information systems. Data bases; Memory organisation. Data processing; Reverse engineering; Software; Testing; Utility programs; Data manipulation language; Database query; Reverse engineering; Database; Maintenance; Data structure; Criticality; Data flow; SQL; Data flow processing
• ISBN: 9780769521688; 0769521681
• ISSN: 1098-8068
• DOI: 10.1109/IDEAS.2004.1319801

The evolving nature of a database imposes continuous changes in both its structure and data that may respectively affect any dependent application. Within such a dynamic environment, there is a growing demand for methodologies focused on testing and maintaining database applications. Towards this direction a new approach is introduced that initially applies reverse engineering on the application in order to move the embedded SQL statements from the application code into the database. Subsequently, database schema modifications are classified according to their criticality to database related code. Critical changes are isolated and their impact is analyzed by using data flow information specifically tailored for the data manipulation language.