Extracting OCL Integrity Constraints from Object Relational Database

Database reverse engineering is the mechanism of extracting a conceptual schema (CS) from running database which represent at a level of abstraction, the database implementation. The obtained schema may be used to ease, among others, database update, maintenance and evolution. Over the last few years, the object relational database (ORDB) was created. These type of database management system merge the object oriented construct into relational database. In spite of that, a few approach of object relational database was developed. Business rules are usually implemented in the database as integrity constraints for simple rules and triggers for complex constraints. This part is ignored by current database reverse engineering methods which only focus on structural aspect of the database (tables, attributes, types). Triggers and column constraints which represent the dynamic part of the database are not transformed and presented in the conceptual schema. In this sense, our main goal is to present a new approach of object relational database reverse engineering that can generate a conceptual schema expressed as UML class diagram and extended with a set of OCL expressions (Object Constraint Language) which represent business rules implemented as triggers and integrity constraints.