Model-driven data migration

Thesis

Information systems often hold data of considerable value. Their continuing development or maintenance will often necessitate evolution of the system and migration of the data from one version to the next: a process that may be expensive, time-consuming, and prone to error. That such a process remains a source of challenges, is recognized by both academia and industry. In current practice, data migration is often considered only in the later stages of development, leaving critical data to be transformed and loaded by hand-written scripts, long after the design process has been completed.

The advent of model-driven engineering offers an opportunity to consider the question of information system evolution and data migration earlier in the development process. A precise account of the proposed changes to an existing system model can be used to predict the consequences for existing data, and to generate the necessary data migration implementation.

This dissertation shows how automatic data migration can be achieved by extending the definition of a data modeling language to include model level operations, each of which corresponds to the addition, modification, or deletion of a model component. Using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) notation as an example, we show how the specification of these operations may be translated into an abstract program in the Abstract Machine Notation (AMN), employed in the B-method, and then formally checked for consistency and applicability prior to translation into a concrete programming notation, such as Structured Query Language (SQL).

Authors: Aboulsamh, M; Mohammed Aboulsamh

• Publication date: 2012
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-azeqr677q
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: software engineering; information system evolution; model-driven development
• Subjects: Software engineering