Abstract
Database application programs may be considered as good candidates for the application of formal specification methods, because much of the database and transaction semantics can be captured in terms of integrity constraints as well as pre- and postconditions. Furthermore, the use of current transaction models as units of database state transitions favours the use of Dijkstra’s substitutions.
Traditional DBMS solutions guarantee database integrity by expensive tests at transaction commit time. In the DAIDA project a different approach was taken interpreting database constraints as parts of formal specifications and by extracting correct database programs from such specifications. Database and transaction constraints are captured by an expressive semantic data model in the style of TAXIS, transformed into Abstract Machines and finally refined into AM versions that are equivalent to programs written in the strongly-typed database programming language DBPL.
The work reported in this paper evaluates the DAIDA experience and addresses the shortcomings of DAIDA. A new formal specification language SAMT is proposed that essentially allows to structure and modularize specifications and to capture particular classes of constraints by its type system. Moreover, SAMT is considered as a framework for both the specification of database applications as well as the refinement of specifications into executable programs, thus eliminating some of the complexity issues found in the multi-language approach of DAIDA.
This work has been supported in part by research grants from the E.E.C. Basic Research Action 3070 FIDE: “Formally Integrated Data Environments”.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag London
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Schewe, KD., Wetzel, I., Schmidt, J.W. (1992). Towards a Structured Specification Language for Database Applications. In: Harper, D.J., Norrie, M.C. (eds) Specifications of Database Systems. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3864-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3864-8_14
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