Bridging the Gap between Variability in Client Application and Database Schema

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (N. Siegmund, C. Kästner, M. Rosenmüller, F. Heidenreich, S. Apel, G. Saake)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Norbert Siegmund, Christian Kästner, Marko Rosenmüller, Florian Heidenreich, Sven Apel, and Gunter Saake. Bridging the Gap between Variability in Client Application and Database Schema. In Proceedings of the 13. GI-Fachtagung Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web (BTW), ISBN 978-3-88579-238-3, pages 297--306, Bonn, Germany: Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), March 2009.

Database schemas are used to describe the logical design of a database. Diverse groups of users have different perspectives on the schema which leads to different local schemas. Research has focused on view integration to generate a global, consistent schema out of different local schemas or views. However, this approach seems to be too constrained when the generated global view should be variable and only a certain subset is needed. Variable schemas are needed in software product lines in which products are tailored to the needs of stakeholders. We claim that traditional modeling techniques are not sufficient for expressing a variable database schema. We show that software product line methodologies, when applied to the database schemas, overcome existing limitations and allow the generation of tailor-made database schemas.