Extending Semantic based Techniques for Policy-based Slicing of Database Program

Abstract

The innovation of the program slicing technique brings a revolution to address several issues (e.g. code understanding, debugging, maintenance, testing, etc.) in the more complex and large information systems. Over the past, many slicing techniques have been proposed, however, all these existing approaches did not consider the external database states. Moreover, the majority of the proposed slicing approaches are syntax-based and they do not consider the properties of variables and database attributes. Therefore, existing techniques are not directly applicable to data-intensive programs in information system scenarios and majority of them fails to compute precise slicing results. In this work, we propose a policy-based slicing framework for data-intensive programs. The policies are integrity constraints that are defined on data as per the business goal and kept in a backend database. We design our propose framework using the data dependency graph of data-intensive programs. We refine (by removing false alarms) the data dependency graph using semantics-based techniques, Condition-Action Rules and Hoare Logic. This refined graph yields precise slicing results w.r.t the policies of data-intensive programs.