Bridging the application and DBMS divide using static analysis and dynamic profiling

ABSTRACT

Relational database management systems (RDBMSs) today serve as the backend for many real-world data intensive applications. Database developers use data access APIs such as ADO.NET to execute SQL queries and access data. While modern program analysis and code profilers are extensively used during the software development life cycle, there is a significant gap in these technologies for database applications because these tools have little or no understanding of data access APIs or the DBMS. We have developed tools that: (a) Enhance traditional static analysis of programs by leveraging understanding of database APIs to help developers identify security, correctness and performance problems in the application. This enables such problems to be detected early in the application lifecycle. (b) Extend the existing DBMS and application profiling infrastructure to enable correlation of application events with DBMS events. This allows profiling across application, data access and DBMS layers. We demonstrate how our tools enable a rich class of analysis, tuning and profiling tasks that are otherwise not possible today.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alfred V. Aho , Monica S. Lam , Ravi Sethi , Jeffrey D. Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2006
• 2: Surajit Chaudhuri , Vivek Narasayya , Manoj Syamala, Bridging the application and DBMS profiling divide for database application developers, Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases, September 23-27, 2007, Vienna, Austria
• 3: Arjun Dasgupta , Vivek Narasayya , Manoj Syamala, A Static Analysis Framework for Database Applications, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, p.1403-1414, March 29-April 02, 2009 [doi>10.1109/ICDE.2009.98]
• 4: Event Tracing for Windows. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363787.aspx .
• 5: FxCop: Application for analyzing managed code assemblies. http://msdn.microsoft.com.
• 6: Phoenix Compiler Framework. http://research.microsoft.com/phoenix/compiler.aspx

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.m MISCELLANEOUS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Management, Measurement, Performance, Security

Keywords:
database application, dynamic profiling, static analysis