Special purpose database engineering

Design methods for standard databases that support OLTP systems have been studied and applied for decades. However, these approaches fall short when coping with non standard databases. PReCISE has invested in the study of three special purpose databases, namely active, temporal and statistics databases. For beach of them, it has developed models, design methodologies and tools.

In the active database domain, the emphasis has been on specifying complex conceptual integrity constraints and generating SQL code for controling these constraints. In particular, rules have been developed for extending the expressiveness of relational databases to existence constraints, redundancies and complete inheritance constraints in SQL2. Specific DB-MAIN components have been developed for automatic code generation.

All information systems include temporal or historical data. However, modeling and managing these data pose complex theoretical and practical problems. Comprehensive conceptual, logical and physical models have been elaborated, including transaction, valid and bitemporal dimensions. A CASE tool, based on DB-MAIN, has been developed to specify and generate active databases managing all the temporal dimensions.  

Huge resources have been devoted to the development of methods and tools to feed a statistics data warehouse with data from hétérogeneous sources, included poorly written paper documents. Special attention is paid to the evolution of dimensions (add/remove/change dimensions and dimension values). The tool also includes a user-friendly web-based query interface.  These results have been successfully applied to penal and economic statistics in several Belgian administrations.

 

Keywords

database design, active database, temporal database, statistics database, data warehouse, data dematerialization, CASE tool

 

Contributing projects

  • DB-MAIN (Database Engineering)
  • TimeStat (Web-based data warehouse from poor quality data sources)
  • Quetelet.net - Instap (Web-based data warehouse for historical criminal statistics)

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Former projects

  • Active Database (Active Database Engineering)
  • TimeStamp (Temporal Database Engineering)
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