Being stuck with a legacy database schema that no longer reflects your data model is every developer’s nightmare. Yet with all the talk of refactoring code for maintainability I have not heard much of refactoring outdated database schemas.
What are some tips on how to transition to a better schema without breaking all the code that relies on the old one? I will propose a specific problem I am having to illustrate my point but feel free to give advice on other techniques that have proven helpful – those will likely come in handy as well.
My example:
My company receives and ships products. Now a product receipt and a product shipment have some very different data associated with them so the original database designers created a separate table for receipts and for shipments.
In my one year working with this system I have come to the realization that the current schema doesn’t make a lick of sense. After all, both a receipt and a shipment are basically a transaction, they each involve changing the amount of a product, at heart only the +/- sign is different. Indeed, we frequently need to find the total amount that the product has changed over a period of time, a problem for which this design is downright intractable.
Obviously the appropriate design would be to have a single Transactions table with the Id being a foreign key of either a ReceiptInfo or a ShipmentInfo table. Unfortunately, the wrong schema has already been in production for some years and has hundreds of stored procedures, and thousands of lines of code written off of it. How then can I transition the schema to work correctly?
Here’s a whole catalogue of database refactorings:
http://databaserefactoring.com/