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A Literature Review on Schema Evolution in Databases
Open accessAbstract
Changing a database schema is a fact of life in information systems, as a response to changes inside the enterprise (e.g., new users’ requirements, correction of errors in the current database schema) or outside it (e.g., new regulations, new partners’ requirements). In the database research field, a well-known technique has been proposed for managing schema changes, called schema evolution. It allows the database to survive schema changes by adapting existing data to conform to the new schema. A lot of research efforts addressed the topic of schema evolution, in both conventional (i.e., relational) and advanced (e.g., XML, stream, NoSQL) databases, providing a plethora of heterogeneous approaches and solutions making up a quite large literature. Since there is no research work that extensively deals with different proposals and compares them, the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by reviewing the available schema evolution literature. For that, first we collected and summarized the contributions of research papers dealing with database schema evolution. Then we organized their presentation in a chronological order, also giving a historical perspective on the topic development. Finally, we defined a list of six comparison criteria (database model, implementation, schema change semantics, schema change propagation, integrity constraints, and software evolution) that have helped us to categorize and compare the different database schema evolution proposals. In sum, our…
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“Literature was retrieved from IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink to ensure multidisciplinary coverage and reduce the risk of publication bias (Brahmia et al., 2024).”
From A REVIEW ON OBJECT-ORIENTED, OBJECT-RELATIONAL, RELATIONAL, AND NOSQL DATABASES: EVOLUTION, INTEGRATION, AND PERFORMANCE TRADE-OFFS (2025) · cites this paper as Brahmia et al., 2024
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“SQL systems have a 2.0 in flexibility because they usually need downtime to evolve the schema or have expensive migration procedures (Brahmia et al., 2024).”
From A REVIEW ON OBJECT-ORIENTED, OBJECT-RELATIONAL, RELATIONAL, AND NOSQL DATABASES: EVOLUTION, INTEGRATION, AND PERFORMANCE TRADE-OFFS (2025) · cites this paper as Brahmia et al., 2024
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Self-citationSchema validation and evaluation framework for extracted schemas in JSON databases
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Metadata
- Authors
- Brahmia, Z., Grandi, F., & Oliboni, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Sfax (TN)
- Dipartimento di Informatica – Scienza e Ingegneria, Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, I-40136 Bologna, Italy
- University of Verona (IT)
- Venue
- Computing Open
- Publisher
- World Scientific Pub Co Pte Ltd
- Published
- 2024-01
- Volume
- 02
- ISSN
- 2972-3701 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4399752508
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 82
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 2.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Computing Open (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Advanced Database Systems and Queries
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Semantic Web and Ontologies
- Keywords
- schema evolution, database schema changes, data migration, integrity constraints, software evolution, relational databases, XML databases, NoSQL databases, stream databases
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