TY - GEN
T1 - Structure Elicitation in Database Reverse Engineering
AU - Hainaut, Jean-Luc
AU - Henrard, Jean
AU - Roland, Didier
AU - Englebert, Vincent
AU - Hick, Jean-Marc
PY - 1996
Y1 - 1996
N2 - Recovering the semantic description of file and database structures is an important aspect of business application reverse engineering. It includes an important and delicate activity, namely data structure extraction, i.e. finding the exact data structures and integrity constraints of the database. This process is made more complex than generally expected due to the fact that these structures and constraints often are not explicitly defined, but are translated into implicit constructs, controlled and managed through procedural code or user interface protocol for instance. This paper describes the problem of implicit structure elicitation. It propose an analysis of this phenomenon, and of the techniques and heuristics that can be used in the elicitation process. It develops a set of efficient techniques and a strategy for the elicitation of one of the most common implicit construct, namely the foreign key. The paper also explains how DB-MAIN, a general-purpose database reverse engineering CASE tool, can help analysts elicit implicit constructs, and specifically foreign keys.
AB - Recovering the semantic description of file and database structures is an important aspect of business application reverse engineering. It includes an important and delicate activity, namely data structure extraction, i.e. finding the exact data structures and integrity constraints of the database. This process is made more complex than generally expected due to the fact that these structures and constraints often are not explicitly defined, but are translated into implicit constructs, controlled and managed through procedural code or user interface protocol for instance. This paper describes the problem of implicit structure elicitation. It propose an analysis of this phenomenon, and of the techniques and heuristics that can be used in the elicitation process. It develops a set of efficient techniques and a strategy for the elicitation of one of the most common implicit construct, namely the foreign key. The paper also explains how DB-MAIN, a general-purpose database reverse engineering CASE tool, can help analysts elicit implicit constructs, and specifically foreign keys.
KW - methodology
KW - database reverse engineering
KW - CASE tool
KW - program understanding
M3 - Conference contribution
SP - 131
EP - 140
BT - Proc. of the 3rd Working Conf. on Reverse Engineering
PB - IEEE Computer Society Press
ER -