Translating relational schema with constraints into OODB schema

Abstract

We consider the problem of translating a relational database schema into that of an object-oriented database. Our approach is designed to extract semantics by investigating into the structure of relations, their key constraints, and inclusion/referential constraints. These constraints can be existing ones from the schema or they can be given by users who know about the data characteristics in the relational database. In this way, our translator can achieve semantic enhancement by explicitly representing implicit or missing semantics in a relational database schema. The major features of our translator include identifying relation clusters representing object classes, identifying ID-dependencies (complex object classes), identifying ISA hierarchy among objects, generation of object identifiers, and identifying inter-object relationships.