Database Design Recovery

The design of a software component, such as a database, is the trace of all the processes, products and reasonings that have led to the production of this artifact. Such a document is the very basis of system maintenance and evolution processes. Unfortunately, it does not exist in most situations. The paper describes how the design of a database or of a collection of files can be recovered through reverse engineering techniques. Recording the reverse engineering activities provides a history of this process. By normalizing and reversing this history, then by conforming it according to a reference design methodology, one can obtain a tentative design of the source database. The paper describes the baselines of the approach, such as a wide spectrum specification model, semantics-preserving transformational techniques, and a design process model. It describes a general procedure to build a possible DB design, then states the requirements for CASE support, and describes DB-MAIN, a prototype CASE tool which includes a history processor. Finally it illustrates the proposals through an example.