A structural approach towards the maintenance of database applications

The evolving nature of a database imposes continuous changes in both its structure and data that may respectively affect any dependent application. Within such a dynamic environment, there is a growing demand for methodologies focused on testing and maintaining database applications. Towards this direction a new approach is introduced that initially applies reverse engineering on the application in order to move the embedded SQL statements from the application code into the database. Subsequently, database schema modifications are classified according to their criticality to database related code. Critical changes are isolated and their impact is analyzed by using data flow information specifically tailored for the data manipulation language.