1989 Reports

Data Migration in an Object-Oriented Software Development Environment

Sokolsky, Michael

As software systems grow from small systems developed by a handful of people to large, complex systems developed by hundreds of people, the environment in which they are developed evolves. Large software systems contain vast quantities of data that must migrate to new development environments. Object-oriented software development environments (OOSDEs) have received research attention recently, and seem destined to become commonplace for software development of these large systems. System growth involves data migration, a problem that must be solved before OOSDEs become practical tools. Data migration includes immigration (import) of systems developed using traditional facilities, reorganization of systems supported by object-oriented databases (objectbases), and schema evolution as the class structure of the objectbase changes. This thesis presents graphics-oriented tools -- Marvelizer and Organ -- that solve the first two problems for the Marvel OOSDE. Marvelizer and Organ have been implemented and used on Marvel itself.