Time-Related Patterns of Schema Evolution

Panos Vassiliadis, Alexandros Karakasidis

Summary

This paper presents a set of patterns on how schema evolution takes place over time in Free Open-Source Systems that are built on top of relational databases. To come up with these timing patterns, we have studied 151 projects of a public dataset of schema histories, with duration more than 12 months. The eight timing patterns of schema evolution are largely grouped in 3 families: (a) the family of limited and focused-in-time change, whose members differ only on when the change happens (early, middle or late life of a project), (b) the family of regular updates, whose members differ in the frequency of change, and (c) the family of middle or late initiation of change, whose members differ in the initiation of schema maintenance as well as the frequency of change.

Texts

Panos Vassiliadis, Alexandros Karakasidis. Time-Related Patterns of Schema Evolution. 28th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2025), pp: 310-323, Barcelona, Spain, March 25-28, 2025
[Local copy ] [OpenProceedings]
[Schema Biographies: research on Schema Evolution]

Presentations

Plz., refer to our Schema Biographies page for a general overview of our research program.
  • The presentation of Time-related patterns of schema evolution, at EDBT 2025 (PDF)
  • A long presentation of the results of this paper (PDF)

    • Data and code

    All data and code are found at the Schema Evolution Datasets repository, and in particular, data sets, code, and extra material for this paper.