[email protected] for Object-Relational Mapping Supporting Schema Evolution

Persistence of applications written in an object-oriented language using a relational storage system has been investigated for a long time [4]. In this paper, two problems of current approaches to objectrelation mapping are addressed. First, their high configuration effort, and second, their lacking support for continuous development. To address these problems, we introduce a novel object-relational mapping approach, that uses a runtime model of the system. The runtime model is utilized in two ways. First, to derive mapping information from the runtime state of the application, that usually has to be provided by developers. Second, to allow for lossless application schema evolution. That is, we present an approach, that reasons about design time and runtime information to relieve developers from configuration details of the objectrelational mapping and show how to utilize the same information to allow for continuous schema evolution of applications.