Towards a UML Profile to Relational Database Modeling

Database management systems provide a mechanism that enables software application systems to manipulate data from a database. Although object-oriented technology is widely used in the development of software systems, relational database management systems remain the dominant database technology. Database modeling enables software developers to design the database during the system analysis and design phase; however, most approaches focus only on designing database schemas, without considering models for the retrieval of data. A comprehensive database model would provide a solid base on which software developers could organize data for storage and retrieval. Unified modeling language (UML) is a general purpose modeling notation and this paper proposes a UML profile for modeling database retrieval to overcome the inadequacies found in current methods. The proposed model provides views of the database outlining query operations to enable the automatic generation of more comprehensive code in the model-driven development of enterprise information systems. We include examples to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method and its advantages over existing database modeling methods