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International Conference on Conceptual Modeling

ER 1999: Advances in Conceptual Modeling pp 161–172Cite as

Documenting Legacy Relational Databases

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1727))

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of documenting an existing legacy database by mining out its characteristics and derive the corresponding entity-relationship model. We developed algorithms to identify candidate keys of all relations in the relational schema, to locate the occurrence of a given candidate key as foreign key in any existing relation, and to decide on the appropriate links (relationships) between the given relations. Based on the mentioned analysis, we draw a graph that corresponds to the entity-relationship diagram, and predicts all possible relationships between relations in the existing relational schema. Finally, we derive the cardinality of each link in the graph.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Math & Computer Science, American University of Sharjah, P.O. Box 26666, Sharjah, USA

    Reda Alhajj

Authors
  1. Reda Alhajj
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, 298 Coates Hall, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Peter P. Chen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    David W. Embley

  3. INSA-LISI, 20 Avenue Albert Einstein, F-69621, Villeurbanne Cedex, France

    Jacques Kouloumdjian

  4. Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, P.O. Box 23087, Provo, UT, 84602-3087, USA

    Stephen W. Liddle

  5. School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, 5095, South Australia

    John F. Roddick

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Alhajj, R. (1999). Documenting Legacy Relational Databases. In: Chen, P.P., Embley, D.W., Kouloumdjian, J., Liddle, S.W., Roddick, J.F. (eds) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1727. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48054-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48054-4_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66653-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48054-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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