Integrating and querying source code of programs working on a database

Programs and a database's schema contain complex data and control dependencies that make modifying the schema along with multiple portions of the source code difficult to change. In this paper, we address the problem of exploring and analyzing those dependencies that exist between a program and a database's schema using keyword search techniques inside a database management system (DBMS). As a result, we present QDPC, a novel system that allows the integration and flexible querying within a DBMS of source code and a database's schema. The integration focuses on obtaining the approximate matches that exist between source files (classes, function and variable names) and the database's schema (table names and column names), and then storing them in summarization tables inside a DBMS. These summarization tables are then analyzed with SQL queries to find matches that are related to a set of keywords provided by the user. It is possible to perform additional analysis of the discovered matches by computing aggregations over the obtained matches, and to perform sophisticated analysis by computing OLAP cubes. In our experiments, we show that we obtain an efficient integration and allow complex analysis of the dependencies inside the DBMS. Furthermore, we show that searching for data dependencies and building OLAP cubes can be obtained in an efficient manner. Our system opens up the possibility of using the keyword search for software engineering applications.