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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 967–973Cite as

Database Reverse Engineering

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Synonyms

Database design recovery; Database redocumentation

Definition

Database reverse engineering is the process through which the logical and conceptual schemas of a legacy database, or of a set of files, are reconstructed from various information sources such as DDL code, data dictionary contents, database contents or the source code of application programs that use the database.

Basically, database reverse engineering comprises three processes, namely physical schema extraction, logical schema reconstruction, and schema conceptualization. The first process consists in parsing the DDL code or the contents of an active data dictionary in order to extract the physical schema of the database. Reconstructing the logical schema implies analyzing additional sources such as the data and the source code of the application programs to discover implicit constraints and data structures, that is, constructs that have not been declared but that are managed by the information system or by its...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Namur, Namur, Belgium

    Jean-Luc Hainaut, Jean Henrard, Vincent Englebert, Didier Roland & Jean-Marc Hick

Authors
  1. Jean-Luc Hainaut
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  2. Jean Henrard
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  3. Vincent Englebert
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  4. Didier Roland
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  5. Jean-Marc Hick
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jean-Luc Hainaut .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Alexander Borgida

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Hainaut, JL., Henrard, J., Englebert, V., Roland, D., Hick, JM. (2018). Database Reverse Engineering. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_646

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