A novel UML profile for representation of a relational database schema

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel specification of a UML profile for the representation of a relational database schema. The profile specification is based on the UML class diagram extension that exploits operation signature for the representation of specific relational database concepts, such as single and multi-column primary and foreign keys, indices, etc. The advantages of the proposed approach are: reduction of additional properties in the stereotypes representing the keys, better visualization of database constraints and more efficient forward database engineering. We also present the corresponding profile implementation as an open source development platform plug-in, which allows manual modeling, as well as the automatic (software/program) generation of a relational database scheme in accordance with the defined profile. The application of the implemented profile is illustrated by an example of visualization of a particular relational database schema.