Abstract
With the rapid growth of software size and complexity, how to understand and maintain a software system has become a great challenge in its life-cycle, especially from the global perspective. The paper mainly focuses on the comprehension problem of database-based software systems. A framework for visualizing and analyzing table dependency structure of a DB-based application is proposed, and its corresponding prototype tool named DBViewer is implemented. It mainly includes two main functions, i.e., table dependency visualization in database and structure feature metrics. The key methods of building this tool are proposed and some characters of table dependency relations in database are also found via metrics in this paper. Some experiments are performed on five DB-based software systems, and some preliminary rules have been found: (1) the degree distribution of table dependency graph roughly conforms to power law, (2) the average path length of the max connected subgraph is small, and (3) the clustering effect is not so evident and the coefficients are all less than 0.05 in the max connected sub-graph of all table dependency relations.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 60803046, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No.20070410946, the Science Foundation of Jiangxi Educational Committee under Grant No.GJJZ-2007-267, and the Youth Foundation of Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics. We are also grateful for the great help from Qiong Zhang, Chunxu Huang, Shengbiao Huang, Qiang Liu and Wenjia Ouyang.
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Mao, C. (2009). Visualizing Table Dependency Relations to Reveal Network Characters in Database Applications. In: Huang, M., Nguyen, Q., Zhang, K. (eds) Visual Information Communication. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0312-9_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0312-9_19
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