A method for the recovery of inclusion dependencies from data-intensive business programs

Abstract

Data integrity constraints usually form a major component in a data-intensive business system. To successfully reengineer a data-intensive business system, its data integrity constraints must be understood. Inclusion dependencies constitute an important type of data integrity constraints. They are very important for migrating a system to the object-oriented technology. Many of the world's data-intensive business systems have been developed on old generation database technologies which do not support the specification of inclusion dependencies in the schemas. As a result, most of the inclusion dependencies are enforced in the programs which update the databases. However, no approach has been proposed for the recovery of inclusion dependencies from programs. We develop a theory for inferring inclusion dependencies in a database from the programs which update the database. With the use of the theory, an approach for the recovery of inclusion dependencies from programs is consequently proposed. The proposed approach can recover those inclusion dependencies which cannot be found by the existing approaches. As opposed to the existing approaches, the inclusion dependencies recovered from the proposed approach are proven by analysing the programs which update the databases.