Evaluation of the ITOC information system design recovery tool

Design recovery from legacy information systems is an industrially relevant problem which poses significant research challenges. However, although many approaches have been proposed, few of these have been implemented beyond a prototype stage which makes it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. The Ingres to Oracle Conversion (ITOC) project is a large collaborative research initiative between The University of Queensland and Oracle Corporation to design and implement a tool that automatically recovers both the application structure and the static schema definition of Ingres 4GL applications. The results of this analysis are then loaded into Oracle's CASE tool. The paper describes the basic techniques used by the ITOC tool which includes data flow analysis, query analysis and simple data mining. The effectiveness of these techniques when applied to real commercial applications is then evaluated in detail.