Generating synthetic database schemas for simulation purposes

Abstract

To simulate query answering in Peer Data Management System (PDMSs), simulators need to associate a database schema to each peer in the overlay network. Finding or creating a high number of database schemas can be a time consuming and tendentious task. This work proposes an automatic process to generate multiple synthetic database schemas with semantically coherent variations of a given base schema. The schemas are obtained through applying different types of modifications to subsets of the base schema. Our experimental validation has shown that the proposed method is able to produce random schemas that can be used in realistic simulations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.