Generation of Database Transactions with Petri Nets

Deleting a record from a database table without modifying other records or tables can easily lead to a violation of the database constraints. The same holds for other database operations. In this paper we generate descriptions of transactions triggered by a given operation, guaranteeing that if the database is in a consistent state before a transaction starts, it will be in a consistent state after it is finished. We describe transactions as models of a special subclass of Coloured Petri nets where token values are vectors of identifiers. This class is powerful enough to model transaction execution and it allows for some formal analysis, like soundness.