Querying Versioned Software Repositories

Large parts of today’s data is stored in text documents that undergo a series of changes during their lifetime. For instance during the development of a software product the source code changes frequently. Currently, managing such data relies on version control systems (VCSs). Extracting information from large documents and their different versions is a manual and tedious process. We present Qvestor, a system that allows to declaratively query documents. It leverages information about the structure of a document that is available as a context-free grammar and allows to declaratively query document versions through a grammar annotated with relational algebra expressions. We define and illustrate the annotation of grammars with relational algebra expressions and show how to translate the annotations to easy to use SQL views. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23737-9_4 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-56409 Accepted Version Originally published at: Christopeit, Dietrich; Böhlen, Michael H; Kanne, Carl-Christian; Mazeika, Arturas (2011). Querying versioned software repositories. In: 15th international conference on Advances in databases and information systems , Vienna, Austria, 20 September 2011 23 September 2011, 42-55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23737-9_4 Querying Versioned Software Repositories Dietrich Christopeit, Michael Böhlen, Carl-Christian Kanne, Arturas Mazeika [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract. Large parts of today’s data is stored in text documents that undergo a series of changes during their lifetime. For instance during the development of a software product the source code changes frequently. Currently, managing such data relies on version control systems (VCSs). Extracting information from large documents and their different versions is a manual and tedious process. We present Qvestor, a system that allows to declaratively query documents. It leverages information about the structure of a document that is available as a context-free grammar and allows to declaratively query document versions through a grammar annotated with relational algebra expressions. We define and illustrate the annotation of grammars with relational algebra expressions and show how to translate the annotations to easy to use SQL views. Large parts of today’s data is stored in text documents that undergo a series of changes during their lifetime. For instance during the development of a software product the source code changes frequently. Currently, managing such data relies on version control systems (VCSs). Extracting information from large documents and their different versions is a manual and tedious process. We present Qvestor, a system that allows to declaratively query documents. It leverages information about the structure of a document that is available as a context-free grammar and allows to declaratively query document versions through a grammar annotated with relational algebra expressions. We define and illustrate the annotation of grammars with relational algebra expressions and show how to translate the annotations to easy to use SQL views.