Data Reverse Engineering of Legacy Databases to Object Oriented Conceptual Schemas

This paper presents a solution and a methodology to recover legacy databases of most DBMS using formal-method based techniques. These formal methods (terms rewriting systems) are applied during the data reverse engineering process and allow for an automatic approach. This automatic approach reduces the time invested and the number of people involved in the data reverse engineering and data migration processes. This solution is being implemented in the RELS (Re-Engineering of Legacy Systems) tool. The RELS tool is under development in the in collaboration with the industrial partner CARE-Technologies. RELS is used together with the model compiler Sosy Technology of CARE-Technologies and provides a complete solution to the re-engineering proccess.