Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design

Chapter 10Method Refactorings

This chapter summarizes the code refactorings that we have found applicable to stored procedures, stored functions, and triggers. For the sake of simplicity, we refer to these three types of functionality simply as methods, the term that Martin Fowler used in Refactoring (Fowler 1999). As the name suggests, a method refactoring is a change to a stored procedure that improves its quality. Our goal is to present an overview of these refactorings. You can find detailed descriptions in Refactoring, the seminal work on the subject.

We differentiate between two categories of method refactorings, those that change the interface of the database offered to external programs and those that modify the internals of a method. ...