Article,
Automating the Collection of Object Relational Database Metrics
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), (2011)
Abstract
The quality of software systems is the most important factor to consider when designing and using these systems. The quality of the database or the database management system is particularly important as it is the backbone for all types of systems that it holds their data. Many researches argued that software with high quality will lead to an effective and secure system. Software quality can be assessed by using software measurements or metrics. Typically, metrics have several problems such as: having no specific standards, sometimes they are hard to measure, while at the same time they are time and resource consuming. Metrics need also to be continuously updated. A possible solution to some of those problems is to automate the process of gathering and assessing those metrics. In this research the metrics that evaluate the complexity of Object Oriented Relational Database (ORDB) are composed of the object oriented metrics and relational database metrics. This research is based on common theoretical calculations and formulations of ORDB metrics proposed by database experts. A tool is developed that takes the ORDB schema as an input and then collects several database structural metrics. Based on those proposed and gathered metrics, a study is conducted and showed that such metrics’ assessment can be very useful in assessing the database complexity.
