Reconstruction of ER schema from database applications: a cognitive approach

In the Forward Engineering phase, the designer modifies the database conceptual schema and produces a logical and physical schema containing some “spurious” relations dictated by design tricks and DBMS's limitations. Therefore the rebuilding of the database conceptual schema from the physical database structure is a fundamental issue in the re-engineering and design recovery processes. Some proposed methodologies try to get the necessary information from the schema and from the content of the database, paying little attention to the analysis of the usage that the programs make of the data, while this can be thought as the most reliable source of information. In this paper we present an approach to the reverse engineering based on the identification of schema, primary key, SQL and procedural indicators that lead to the assertion of Prolog facts and, by some heuristic rules, to the rebuilding of the conceptual schema.