An integrated environment for reengineering

This paper presents a tool specifically designed for database reengineering. As is well known, reengineering is the process of (1) applying reverse engineering to a software product to get higher-level specifications, and (2) using these specifications as the starting point for the development of a new version of the system. Thus, the complete process can be seen as a sequence of transformation functions that operate on the different sets of artifacts involved in the whole process. The starting point of the reengineering process is the physical schema of the database, which is translated into a vendor-independent metamodel; then, this is translated into a class diagram representing the possible conceptual schema used during the development of the database. This diagram is then taken as the starting point for the code generation process, which produces an executable application for four possible different platforms.