Extraction of object-oriented structures from existing relational databases

Due to the wide use of object-oriented technology in software development and the existence of many relational databases, reverse engineering of relational schemas to object-oriented schemas is gaining in interest. One of the major problems with existing approaches for this schema mapping is that they fail to take into consideration many modern relational database design alternatives (e.g., use of binary data to store multiple-valued attributes). This paper presents a schema mapping procedure that can be applied on existing relational databases without changing their schema. The procedure maps a relational schema that is at least in 2NF into an object-oriented schema by taking into consideration various types of relational database design optimizations.