Stones falling in water: When and how to restructure a view-based relational database

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most important problems of software engineering continues to be the maintenance of both databases and applications. It is clear that any method that can reduce the impact that database modifications produce on application programs is valuable for software engineering processes. We have proposed such a method, by means of a database evolution architecture (MeDEA) that makes use of database views. By using views, changes in the structure of the database schema can be delayed until absolutely necessary. However, some conditions oblige modifications to be made. In this paper we present an approach to detect when the restructuring process must be realized and how to carry out this restructuring process. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.