Automatic Migration of Files into Relational Databases

ABSTRACT In order to provide database-like features for files, particularly for searching in Web data, one solution is to migrate file data into a relational database. Having stored the data, the capabilities of SQL can be used for querying, provided, the data has been given some structure. To this end, an adapter must be implemented that converts data from files into the database. This paper proposes a specification-based automation for this procedure: Given some descriptive specification of file contents, those file adapters are generated. An adequate specification language provides powerful concepts to describe the contents of files. In contrast to similar work, directory structures are taken into account because they often contain useful semantics