Student research opportunities
Database Evolution and Migration
Project Code: CECS_787
This project is available at the following levels:
Honours, Summer Scholar, Masters, PhD
Supervisor:
Dr Qing WangOutline:
Database evolution and migration are two important and interwoven tasks we often face when engineering information systems. With new technologies emerging and business requirements changing, database design needs to be constantly evolving to cope with re-engineered business models. Database evolution includes: architecture change, restructuring of databases, adaptation of functionality, interface modernisation, wrapping of database components, etc. At certain point when an existing database does no longer meet business requirements, database migration happens, in which components of the existing database are migrated into a new re-designed database.
From a transformational point of view, both database evolution and database migration transform databases in a way that only preserves desired properties. The questions arising are: 1) how can we know that desired properties of an existing database are preserved during such a transformation? 2) how can we ensure that changes on an existing database will give rise to new properties of interest after such a transformation?
Goals of this project
This project aims to develop a formal methodology for database evolution and migration that will enable us to specify and verify desired properties of transformations occurring in the process of database evolution and migration. The project will build upon our previous work on data migration (i.e., B. Thalheim, Q. Wang. Towards a Theory of Refinement for Data Migration. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, LNCS, vol. 6998, pp. 318-331, Springer, 2011).
Requirements/Prerequisites
Having knowledge of formal methods and relational databases is ideal but not essential.
