A prototype using a hybrid approach to recover dynamic semantics from relational schema

Abstract

Organizations with legacy database systems are seeking solutions to re-engineer their existing relational databases to object-oriented databases for better maintainability and evolutionary ability. Kwan (1997) has proposed a complete methodology to transform relational schema to object-oriented schema, using data reverse engineering to extract the structural semantics and a hybrid approach to recover dynamic semantics from data flow diagrams and data dictionary. This paper presents the result of applying Kwan's methodology to a college system, of which the relational database schema is successfully transformed to object-oriented database schema with both structural and dynamic semantics. This paper proves that the hybrid approach in recovering dynamic semantics from data flow diagrams is feasible, simple and cost-effective.