Quality issues in database reverse engineering: an overview

Abstract

Database reverse engineering is the part of system maintenance work that produces a sufficient understanding of an existing database and its application domain to allow appropriate changes to be made. It is often difficult to obtain a good conceptual understanding of an old and ill-designed database, especially when there is a lack of documentation. Database reverse engineering attempts to provide solutions for these problems. Three quality issues regarding reverse engineering of existing databases are discussed: (1) the method of database design chosen to serve as the basis for reverse engineering, (2) thoroughness of domain semantics acquisition, and (3) performance evaluation criteria. These quality issues are important for any database reverse engineering method in order for it to perform at a high level of automation, and to obtain a conceptual schema that is semantically rich and correct.