CodeCritics applied to database schema: Challenges and first results

Relational databases (DB) play a critical role in many information systems. For different reasons, their schemas gather not only tables and columns but also views, triggers or stored functions (i.e., fragments of code describing treatments). As for any other code-related artefact, software quality in a DB schema helps avoiding future bugs. However, few tools exist to analyse DB quality and prevent the introduction of technical debt. Moreover, these tools suffer from limitations like the difficulty to deal with some entities (e.g., functions) or dependencies between entities. This paper presents research issues related to assessing the software quality of a DB schema by adapting existing source code analysis research to database schemas. We present preliminary results that have been validated through the implementation of DBCritics, a prototype tool to perform static analysis on the SQL source code of a database schema. DBCritics addresses the limitations of existing DB quality tools based on an internal representation considering all entities of the database and their relationships.