DAHLIA 2.0: A Visual Analyzer of Database Usage in Dynamic and Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

Understanding the links between application programs and their database is useful in various contexts such as migrating information systems towards a new database platform, evolving the database schema, or assessing the overall system quality. However, data-intensive applications nowadays tend to access their underlying database in an increasingly dynamic way. The queries that they send to the database server are usually built at runtime, through String concatenation, or Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) frameworks. This level of dynamicity significantly complicates the task of adapting programs to an evolving database schema. In this paper, we present DAHLIA 2.0, an interactive visualization tool that allows developers to analyze the database usage in order to support data-intensive software evolution and more precisely, program-database co-evolution.