Validating Database Components of Software Systems

In this article, we present a framework and a concrete method to support validation of central database components in application software. We explain how validation can cope with both the need for a formalized evaluation of correctness as well as the need for prototyping high level database speciications in early development phases. We deene diierent levels of correctness suitable for database speciications and show how these levels can be checked by our validation method. For this purpose, we describe both the method's formal basis and explain step-by-step the corresponding pragmatic algorithm to actually generate test data and validate the speciication.