On the Design and Maintenance of Optimized Relational Representations of Entity-Relationship Schemas

A method for obtaining optimized relational representations of database conceptual schemas in an extended entity-relationship model is first proposed. The method incorporates and generalizes a familiar heuristics to obtain good relational representations and also produces, for each relational structure, an explanation indicating which concepts it represents. Then, a redesign method that, given changes to the conceptual schema, generates a plan to modify the original representation and to organize the database state is described.