TO APPEAR “Managing the History of Metadata in support for DB Archiving and Schema Evolution“, Carlo A. Curino, Hyun J. Moon, Carlo Zaniolo, ER Interational Workshop on Evolution and Change in Data Management (ECDM) 2008
Modern information systems, and web information systems
in particular, are faced with frequent database schema changes, which
generate the necessity to manage such evolution and preserve their his-
tory. In this paper, we describe the Panta Rhei Framework designed to
provide powerful tools that: (i) facilitate schema evolution and guide the
Database Administrator in planning and evaluating changes, (ii) support
automatic rewriting of legacy queries against the current schema version,
(iii) enable efficient archiving of the histories of data and metadata, and
(iv) support complex temporal queries over such histories. We then in-
troduce the Historical Metadata Manager (HMM), a tool designed to
facilitate the process of documenting and querying the schema evolution
itself. We use the schema history of the Wikipedia database as a telling
example of the many uses and benefits of HMM.
For more information: http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/schema-evolution/index.php/Prima