Vassiliadis, Panos, Apostolos V. Zarras, and Ioannis Skoulis. “How is life for a table in an evolving relational schema? Birth, death and everything in between.” In International Conference on Conceptual Modeling , pp. 453-466. Springer, Cham, 2015.
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In this paper, we study the version history of eight databases that are part of larger open source projects, and report on our observations on how evolution-related properties, like the possibility of deletion, or the amount of updates that a table undergoes, are related to observable table properties like the number of attributes or the time of birth of a table. Our findings indicate that (i) most tables live quiet lives; (ii) few top-changers adhere to a profile of long duration, early birth, medium schema size at birth; (iii) tables with large schemata or long duration are quite unlikely to be removed, and, (iv) early periods of the database life demonstrate a higher level of evolutionary activity compared to later ones.