Jácome Cunha, João Saraiva, Joost Visser. From spreadsheets to relational databases and back. In Germán Puebla, Germán Vidal, editors, Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-based Program Manipulation, PEPM 2009, Savannah, GA, USA, January 19-20, 2009. pages 179-188, ACM, 2009. [doi]
This paper presents techniques and tools to transform spreadsheets into relational databases and back. A set of data refinement rules is introduced to map a tabular datatype into a relational database schema. Having expressed the transformation of the two data models as data refinements, we obtain for free the functions that migrate the data. We use well-known relational database techniques to optimize and query the data. Because data refinements define bi-directional transformations we can map such database back to an optimized spreadsheet. We have implemented the data refinement rules and we constructed Haskell-based tools to manipulate, optimize and refactor Excel-like spreadsheets.