Testbed for Schema Evolution Tools

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"Change is the law of nature ". Confirming to this law of nature, Information systems are highly subjected to continuous changes, including changes in data, schema, applications and queries. Open source software development has also added to the magnitude of changes or evolution. Evolution adds complexity and can have a dramatic impact on Information Systems. However research to solve the problem of schema evolution is still in its infancy. Tools such as PRISM, PRIMA, HMM (Curino et al. 2008) have been recently proposed to assist DBAs in schema evolution. The Web Information Systems (WIS) group at UCLA is in the process of setting up a benchmark for such tools. As part of the effort, a testbed has been prepared to test the efficacy of those schema evolution support tools and others such as Schema Evolution Toolsuite and SQL2SMO Translator and PRISM. The first two tools are also useful in generating input data for PRISM in the form of Evolution Database or Schema Modification Operators (SMOs). PRISM has been tested with Schema Modification Operators (SMOs) and Integrity Constraints Modification Operators (ICMOs) to evaluate its efficiency in assisting in the Graceful Schema Evolution. This page presents detailed description of the test datasets used to test the tools, the behaviors expected, and results produced.

Motivation Schema Evolution has gained recognition as a practical problem, and it has attracted researcher’s attention. However the research is still in its infancy. Several tools such as PRISM, PRIMA, HMM etc. have been proposed in the past and Carlo Curino and DB group at UCLA are in process of setting up a benchmark for schema evolution. This testbed for testing schema evolution tools is an addition to that effort. It will provide a rich set of test cases to evaluate and provide feedback on the efficiency of such tools. The testbed also helps the beginners getting familiar with the typical changes taking place in any schema evolution and the type of inputs used by various tools to predict the impact of that evolution.

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