Mapping between Alloy Specifications and Database Implementations

The emergence of lightweight formal methods tools such as Alloy improves the software design process, by encouraging developers to model and verify their systems before engaging in hideous implementation details. However, an abstract Alloy specification is far from an actual implementation, and manually refining the former into the latter is unfortunately a non-trivial task. This paper identifies a subset of the Alloy language that is equivalent to a relational database schema with the most conventional integrity constraints, namely functional and inclusion dependencies. This semantic correspondence enables both the automatic translation of Alloy specifications into relational database schemas and the reengineering of legacy databases into Alloy. The paper also discusses how to derive an object-oriented application layer to serve as interface to the underlying database.