Reverse engineering of relational database applications

This paper presents techniques for reverse engineering of relational database applications. The target of such an effort is the definition of a fully equipped object-oriented view of the relational database, including methods and constraints. Such views can be seen as a full specification of the database semantics, aiding for example in the identification of semantic heterogeneity among interoperable databases. The general problem of translating from an imperative programming language environment to a declarative context such as provided by our target OODML is very hard. However, we show that the specific features of database application software allow for the development of a framework geared towards the particular problems encountered in this context