From Spreadsheets to Relational Databases and Back?

Abstract. This paper presents techniques and tools to transform spread-sheets into relational databases and back. A set of data refinement rules is introduced to map a tabular datatype into a relational database schema. Having expressed the transformation of the two data models as data re-finements, we obtain for free the functions that migrate the data. We use well-known relational database techniques to optimize and query the data. Because data refinements define bidirectional transformations we can map such database back to an optimized spreadsheet. We have implemented the data refinement rules and we have constructed tools to manipulate, optimize and refactor Excel-like spreadsheets.