DBA companion: a tool for logical database tuning

Understanding data semantics from existing relational databases is important for several applications such as database maintenance and analysis, database re-engineering, data warehouse design or query optimization. We present a tool called DBA Companion, which can be a help to deal with the understanding of existing relational databases. The prototype integrates algorithms dedicated to database analysis. This task rests on data mining techniques, which allow to design efficient algorithms. Emphasis is put on algorithm efficiency to be able to address operational situations, and then discover FDs and INDs satisfied in a database instance. The tool follows a loosely coupled approach with the underlying DBMS for algorithm execution. For instance, IARs are generated in the DBMS, which allows the user to modify them and to reiterate the analysis process from these new relations.