Renovating Database Applications with DBAutoAwesome

Renovating a database application is the act of significantly reprogramming the application to meet new needs, extend functionality, or re-design to foster maintainability. It can be costly to manually renovate a database application so techniques for automating the renovation are needed. Previous research in renovation has focused on methods to improve performance, such as autonomic database research to automatically tune a DBMS or manage indexes. But there has been little previous research on how to improve functionality. There are several ways in which the functionality can be improved such as interfaces to other tools (e.g., data mining with Weka), content management system integration (e.g., Wordpress plugins), an enhanced set of forms and scripts to query and manage the data, and database mediation and migration scripts. We focus on the final category in this paper: management of the data. We propose an approach, which we call DBAutoAwesome, that adopts Google’s Auto Awesome philosophy: automatically improve an existing artifact and let the user (developer) decide whether to keep and use the improved artifact. The DBAutoAwesome approach ingests a database application to produce an enhanced application. In this paper we describe how DBAutoAwesome enhances data modification and query forms.