Analyzing the Evolution of Database Usage in Data‐Intensive Software Systems

This chapter presents the research advancements in the field of data‐intensive software system evolution, 5 years after the publication of the
IEEE Computer
column presenting the challenges in this field (A. Cleve, T. Mens, and J.‐L. Hainaut (2010) Data‐intensive system evolution.
Computer
,
43
(8), 110–112). We present the state of the art in this research domain, and report on the evolution of open‐source Java projects relying on relational database technologies. We empirically analyze how the usage of Java database technologies evolve over time. We report on a coarse‐grained source‐code analysis carried out over several thousands of Java projects, and complement this with a fine‐grained longitudinal analysis of the coevolution between database schema changes and source code changes within three large Java projects. The presented results are the first steps toward a recommendation system supporting developers in writing database‐centered code.