TUTORIAL SESSION

 

 

Title:  Database Reverse Engineering

 

Objectives : 

In this tutorial we will present a state-of-the-art survey of reverse engineering of databases.  This area has been an active theme of research since the first generations of databases.  In the Introduction part of the tutorial, the audience will have an historical survey of research activities in the more general field of databases restructuration.  The second part of the tutorial will focus on special issues of re-engineering relational databases.  We will discuss the analysis of legacy databases and different ways to extract from them an abstraction such as conceptual schema.  We will especially examine real databases that are generally optimized and denormalized.  The problems include structure understanding, solving naming inconsistencies, and extracting implicit functional dependencies. 

 

Topics : 

The motivation for this tutorial is to present to the audience a comprehensive overview of this important subject and discuss its applications.  Major topics include :

1. Main objectives of reverse engineering and reengineering
2. Reverse engineering versus Forward engineering
3. Historical survey : from Cobol files to Object Oriented databases
4. Relational Database Reengineering towards ER schemas
1. Syntactical methods
2. Semantic methods
5. Real life databases and Inconsistencies
6. Utility of data mining techniques 

Required Background and Target Audience:

The intended audience for the tutorial are users of database systems, expert researchers and students in databases, or database designers and administrators.  Some background in database theory and database management systems. 

 

Tutorial Duration :  2-3 Hours. 

 

Method of Presentation: Transparencies and overhead projector.  Tutorial notes will be made available. 

 

Presenter:  Dr. Martine Collard

I3S Laboratory

University of Nice, Sophia-Antipolis

France

E-mail:  mcollard@unice.fr 

 

 

Biographical Sketch:

Martine Collard leads the Data Mining Group at I3S Laboratory at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France).  She is currently an assistant professor in the Institute of Technology at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis.  Dr. Collard received her degrees in 1994 from University of Nice, Sophia-Antipolis.  She has academic and research interests in databases, data mining and artificial intelligence.  Dr. Collard is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems.