In order to conduct research effectively, scientists must be able to access, organize, describe, and produce data as part of their daily research activities. While relational databases are well suited to the tasks of describing and organizing scientific metadata and results, the difficulties of using relational database management systems effectively, have resulted in their limited adoption among scientists. In addition, scientific research is changing steadily with new experimental protocols, instruments, and discoveries that determine what data are generated and how they must be described and organized according to a relational schema. Unfortunately, evolving a schema is one of the most difficult aspects of database usage. The conventional data definition and manipulation languages offer relatively low-level programming abstractions to perform complex database evolution tasks, and therefore require specialized technical skills not possessed by most scientists. A simplified means of expressing database evolution operations would reduce the effort for non-expert users of databases. This paper presents a high-level, user-oriented, schema evolution framework built on a formal algebra of schema modification operators. The approach allows introduction of novel operators as motivated by new requirements and is amenable to well established optimization techniques for efficient planning and execution. We also propose a rigorous evaluation methodology for comparing the user effort of database evolution languages, and we introduce a benchmark for evaluating the execution efficiency of schema evolution expressions. We present the framework and its implementation, and we demonstrate its utility in exemplar use cases and a performance evaluation.

中文翻译：

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CHiSEL：一个面向用户的简化数据库演化的框架

为了有效地进行研究，科学家必须能够访问、组织、描述和生成数据，作为他们日常研究活动的一部分。虽然关系数据库非常适合描述和组织科学元数据和结果的任务，但有效使用关系数据库管理系统的困难导致它们在科学家中的采用有限。此外，科学研究正在不断变化，新的实验协议、仪器和发现决定了生成什么数据以及必须如何根据关系模式描述和组织这些数据。不幸的是，演变模式是数据库使用中最困难的方面之一。传统的数据定义和操作语言提供相对低级的编程抽象来执行复杂的数据库演化任务，因此需要大多数科学家不具备的专业技术技能。表达数据库演化操作的简化方法将减少非数据库专家用户的工作量。本文提出了一种基于模式修改运算符的正式代数的高级、面向用户的模式演化框架。该方法允许在新需求的推动下引入新的运算符，并且适用于有效规划和执行的完善的优化技术。我们还提出了一种严格的评估方法来比较数据库进化语言的用户努力，我们引入了一个基准来评估模式演化表达式的执行效率。我们介绍了该框架及其实现，并展示了其在示例用例和性能评估中的实用性。