Re-engineering relational databases: the way forward

This paper surveys the recent literature about various research trends relevant to Relational DataBase (RDB) reengineering. The paper presents an analysis of approaches and techniques used in this context, including construction of object views on top of RDBs, database integration and database migration. A categorisation is presented of the selected work, concentrating on migrating an RDB as a source into object-based and XML databases as targets. Database migration from the source into each of the targets is discussed and critically evaluated, including the semantic enrichment, schema translation and data conversion. Based on a detailed analysis of the existing literature, it seems that the existing work does not provide a complete solution for more than one target database for either schema or data conversion. Besides, none of the existing proposals can be considered as a method for migrating an RDB into an object-relational database. We propose such a method based on an intermediate canonical data model, which enriches the semantics of the source RDB and captures characteristics of the target databases.

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