Dealing with deviations in DBMSs: an approach to revise consistency constraints

Information systems are used to support the execution of business processes. They are usually developed on the top of database management systems (DBMSs), that store all data used in the business process. Consistency constraints on the database schema reflect the policies and procedures adopted in the business process: they are defined and enforced to guarantee system correctness. During system operation, some constraints may result obsolete because of changes in the procedures the database is supporting or of incomplete information introduced during the design of the system itself. In both cases, we say that the business process is deviating from its model, represented by the consistency constraints. In this paper we present a semi-automatic approach for updating consistency constraints when they result obsolete: information on constraint violations occurred during database operation are collected, and are used to identify new acceptable constraints. The goal of the approach is to pro..