Extracting a Relational Database Schema from a Document Database

As NoSQL databases become increasingly used, more methodologies emerge for migrating from relational databases to NoSQL databases. Meanwhile, there is a lack of methodologies that assist in migration in the opposite direction, from NoSQL to relational. As software is being iterated upon, use cases may change. A system which was originally developed with a NoSQL database may accrue needs which require Atomic, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) features that NoSQL systems lack, such as consistency across nodes or consistency across re-used domain objects. Shifting requirements could result in the system being changed to utilize a relational database. While there are some tools available to transfer data between an existing document database and existing relational database, there has been no work for automatically generating the relational database based upon the data already in the NoSQL system. Not taking the existing data into account can lead to inconsistencies during data migration. This thesis describes a methodology to automatically generate a relational database schema from the implicit schema of a document database. This thesis also includes details of how the methodology is implemented, and what could be enhanced in future works