Abstract
Evolving dependency magnets, i.e., software modules upon which a large number of other modules depend, is always a hard task. As Robert C. Martin has nicely summarized it (see http://www.oodesign.com/design-principles.html), fundamental problems of bad design that hinder evolution include immobility, i.e., difficulty in reuse, rigidity, i.e., the tendency for software to be difficult to change and fragility, i.e., the tendency of the software to break in many places every time it is changed. In such cases, developers are reluctant to evolve the software to avoid facing the impact of change. How are these fundamentals related to schema evolution? We know that changes in the schema of a database affect a large (and not necessarily traced) number of surrounding applications, without explicit identification of the impact. These affected applications can then suffer from syntactic and semantic inconsistencies – with syntactic inconsistency leading to application crashes and semantic inconsistency leading to the retrieval of data other than the ones originally intended. Thus, the puzzle of gracefully facilitating the evolution of data-intensive information systems is evident, and the desideratum of coming up with engineering methods that allow us to design information systems with a view to minimizing the impact of evolution, a noble goal for the research community.
Change is the essential process of all existence – Star Trek’s Spock
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Acknowledgements
The results of our team in the University of Ioannina on the topic of studying and understanding the mechanics of schema evolution would have never been possible without the collaboration and dedication of many colleagues and students. The list of people who have contributed to this effort includes my colleague and long-time collaborator Apostolos Zarras, as well as several of my students who have worked on the topic, specifically Ioannis Skoulis, Fanis Giahos, Michael Kolozoff, Athanasios Pappas, and Maria Zerva. Special mention also goes to my long-term collaborator George Papastefanatos and my PhD student Petros Manousis, with whom we have collaborated for long on the topic of managing schema evolution, from its engineering perspective.
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Vassiliadis, P. (2017). Schema Evolution and Gravitation to Rigidity: A Tale of Calmness in the Lives of Structured Data. In: Ouhammou, Y., Ivanovic, M., Abelló, A., Bellatreche, L. (eds) Model and Data Engineering. MEDI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10563. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66854-3_2
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