A transparent approach for database schema evolution using view mechanism

Abstract

Designing databases that evolve over time is still a major problem today. The database schema is assumed to be stable enough to remain valid even as the modeled environment changes. However, the database administrators are faced with the necessity of changing something in the overall configuration of the database schema. Even though some approaches proposed are provided in current database systems, schema evolution remains an error-prone and time-consuming undertaking. We propose an on-demand transparent solution to overcome the schema evolution, which usually impacts existing applications/queries that have been written against the schema. In order to improve the performance of our approach, we optimize our approach with mapping composition. To this end, we show that our approach has a better potential than traditional schema evolution technique. Our approach, as suggested by experimental evaluation, is much more efficient than the other schema evolution techniques. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.