Recovery of Data Dependencies

Abstract

Today, many companies have to deal with problems in maintaining legacy database applications, which were developed on old database technology. These applications are getting harder and harder to maintain. Reengineering is an important means to address the problems and to upgrade the applications to newer technology (Hainaut, Englebert, Henrard, Hick, J.-M., & Roland, 1995). However, much of the design of legacy databases including data dependencies is buried in the transactions, which update the databases. They are not explicitly stated anywhere else. The recovery of data dependencies designed from transactions is essential to both the reengineering of database applications and frequently encountered maintenance tasks. Without an automated approach, the recovery is difficult and time-consuming. This issue is important in data mining, which entails mining the relationships between data from program source codes. However, until recently, no such approach was proposed in the literature.