In information systems, or data-oriented applications, i.e., in applications the central component of which is a database (or a set of permanent files), it is generally considered that the complexity can be broken down by considering that the files or databases can be reverse engineered (almost) independently of the procedural parts, through a process called DataBase Reverse Engineering (DBRE in short).
Database reverse engineering (DBRE) = recovering the schema(s) of the database of an application from DMS-DDL text and program source code that use the data (and from any relevant source) in order to understand their exact structure and meaning
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CategoryReverseEngineering