Reverse Engineering of Relational Database Applications

1 I n t r o d u c t i o n With the success of object-orientation in complex application domains, an interest in reverse engineering of legacy relational databases into object-oriented specifications has been risen. Such a specification can be seen as defining a view of the relational database in terms of an object-oriented data model. The derivation of such a view has received considerable at tention in literature. However, current work (e.g. [2,3,7]) is concerned with the structural side of such views only, i.e. the translat ion of a relational schema into a corresponding object structure. While such views are adequate as an interface for data interchange, they neglect the additional possibility of the object-oriented model to specify behaviour as well, thus obtaining a high-level specification of both the relational database and its application software. In [10] we proposed to equip object-oriented views of relational databases with methods and constraints extracted from application programs on these databases, thus making semantics embedded in these applications explicitly available at the view level. As a first step in achieving this, we presented an algor i thm for translat ing SQL-statements on a relational schema to object methods on the corresponding object-oriented schema. To fully satisfy the demands defined above, however, we need to address the issue of reverse engineering general database application code. This is the subject of the present paper.