Reverse Engineering of OO constructs in Object-Relational Database Schemas

Reverse engineering applied to databases permits to extract a conceptual schema that represents, at a higher level of abstraction, the database implementation. This resulting conceptual schema may be used to facilitate, among others, system maintenance, evolution and reuse. In the last years, the use of object-relational constructs was incorporated into database development. However, reverse engineering techniques for these specific constructs have not been yet provided. In this sense, the main goal of this paper is to present a method that considers these new constructs in the reverse engineering of an existing object-relational database. As a result of the process, our method returns an equivalent conceptual schema specified in UML (extended with a set of OCL integrity constraints) that represents, at a conceptual level, the database schema. We provide a prototype tool that implements our method for the Oracle9i database management system.