An Integrated Approach to Relational Database Migration

Relational DataBases (RDBs) are dominant in the market place yet they have limitations in the support of complex structure and user-de ned data types provided by relatively recent database technologies (i.e., object-based and XML databases). Such a mismatch inspires work on migrating an RDB into these technologies. The problem is how to effectively migrate existing RDBs, as a source, into the recent database technologies, as targets, and what is the best way to enrich RDBs' semantics and constraints in order to meet the characteristics of these targets? Existing work does not appear to provide a solution for more than one target database. We tackle this question by proposing a solution for migrating an RDB into these targets based on available standards. The solution takes an existing RDB as input, enriches its metadata representation with as much semantics as possible, and constructs an enhanced Relational Schema Representation (RSR). Based on the RSR, a canonical data model is generated, which captures essential characteristics of the target data models that are suitable for migration. A prototype has been implemented, which successfully migrates RDBs into object-oriented, object-relational and XML databases using the canonical data model.