Where was this SQL query executed? a static concept location approach

Concept location in software engineering is the process of identifying where a specific concept is implemented in the source code of a software system. It is a very common task performed by developers during development or maintenance, and many techniques have been studied by researchers to make it more efficient. However, most of the current techniques ignore the role of a database in the architecture of a system, which is also an important source of concepts or dependencies among them. In this paper, we present a concept location technique for data-intensive systems, as systems with at least one database server in their architecture which is intensively used by its clients. Specifically, we present a static technique for identifying the exact source code location from where a given SQL query was sent to the database. We evaluate our technique by collecting and locating SQL queries from testing scenarios of two open source Java systems under active development. With our technique, we are able to successfully identify the source of most of these queries.