Method for migrating monolithic software systems and their global database to isolated microservices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61467/2007.1558.2026.v17i4.1434Keywords:
monolithic systems, microservices migration, database decomposition, database-per-service, sistemas monolíticos, migración a microservicios, descomposición de bases de datosAbstract
Migrating monolithic applications to microservice architectures offers benefits such as scalability, resilience, and continuous deployment. However, decomposing shared monolithic databases remains a major challenge due to strong structural and functional dependencies among application components and shared relational schemas. This paper proposes a semi-automatic decomposition method that identifies candidate microservices and service-specific databases through static analysis of use-case interaction sequences, source code dependencies, and database access relationships aligned with business capabilities. The proposed approach evaluates structural coupling using the Shared Table Coupling Index (IATC) indicator before and after migration. The method was validated through a case study and an empirical evaluation involving 17 monolithic systems from public repositories. The results show a statistically significant reduction in shared-data coupling, with an average reduction of approximately 91%, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for reducing structural dependencies during monolith-to-microservices migration.
Spanish-language metadata / Metadatos en español
Título en español:
Método para migrar sistemas de software monolíticos y su base de datos global hacia microservicios aislados
Resumen:
La migración de aplicaciones monolíticas hacia arquitecturas de microservicios ofrece beneficios como escalabilidad, resiliencia y despliegue continuo. Sin embargo, la descomposición de bases de datos monolíticas compartidas continúa siendo un desafío importante debido a las fuertes dependencias estructurales y funcionales entre los componentes de la aplicación y los esquemas relacionales compartidos. Este artículo propone un método semiautomático de descomposición que identifica microservicios candidatos y bases de datos específicas para cada servicio mediante el análisis estático de las secuencias de interacción de los casos de uso, las dependencias del código fuente y las relaciones de acceso a la base de datos, en correspondencia con las capacidades del negocio. El enfoque propuesto evalúa el acoplamiento estructural mediante el indicador denominado Índice de Acoplamiento por Tablas Compartidas (IATC), antes y después de la migración. El método se validó mediante un estudio de caso y una evaluación empírica que incluyó 17 sistemas monolíticos procedentes de repositorios públicos. Los resultados muestran una reducción estadísticamente significativa del acoplamiento de datos compartidos, con una disminución promedio de aproximadamente el 91 %, lo que demuestra la eficacia del enfoque propuesto para reducir las dependencias estructurales durante la migración de sistemas monolíticos a microservicios.
Palabras Claves:
sistemas monolíticos; migración a microservicios; descomposición de bases de datos; base de datos por servicio; análisis estático.
Smart citations:
https://scite.ai/reports/10.61467/2007.1558.2026.v17i4.1434
Dimensions.
Open Alex.
References
Abgaz, Y. M., McCarren, A., Elger, P., Solan, D., Lapuz, N., Bivol, M., Jackson, G. M., Yilmaz, M., Buckley, J., & Clarke, P. M. (2023). Decomposition of monolith applications into microservices architectures: A systematic review. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49(8), 4213–4242. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3287297
André, M., Raglianti, M., Serbout, S., Cleve, A., & Lanza, M. (2025). An empirical study on database usage in microservices [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.20582
Andrade, B., Santos, S., & Rito Silva, A. (2023). A comparison of static and dynamic analysis to identify microservices in monolith systems. In B. Tekinerdogan, C. Trubiani, C. Tibermacine, P. Scandurra, & C. E. Cuesta (Eds.), Software architecture: 17th European Conference, ECSA 2023, Istanbul, Turkey, September 18–22, 2023, proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 14212, pp. 354–361). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_25
Michael Ayas, H., Leitner, P., & Hebig, R. (2023). An empirical study of the systemic and technical migration towards microservices. Empirical Software Engineering, 28(4), Article 85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10308-9
Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J., & Jacobson, I. (1999). The unified modeling language user guide. Addison-Wesley.
Castillo-Estrada, C. M., Cancino-Villatoro, K., Alvarez-Oval, L. A., Muñoz, M., & de la Cruz Vazquez, A. (2025). Decomposition methodologies of relational databases for migration from systems monolithic to microservices: A systematic literature mapping. In J. Mejía, M. Muñoz, A. Rocha, F. J. Espinosa-Faller, & J. A. Trejo-Sanchez (Eds.), New challenges in software engineering (Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 1209, pp. 183–205). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-90310-6_13
Cochran, W. G. (1977). Sampling techniques (3rd ed.). Wiley.
Evans, E. (2003). Domain-driven design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Filippone, G., Mehmood, N. Q., Autili, M., Rossi, F., & Tivoli, M. (2023). From monolithic to microservice architecture: An automated approach based on graph clustering and combinatorial optimization. In 2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) (pp. 47–57). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00013
Freitas, F., Ferreira, A. L., & Cunha, J. (2023). A methodology for refactoring ORM-based monolithic web applications into microservices. Journal of Computer Languages, 75, Article 101205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101205
Hassan, H., Abdel-Fattah, M. A., & Mohamed, W. (2024). Migrating from monolithic to microservice architectures: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 15(10), 104–116. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0151013
Hao, J., Zhao, J., & Li, Y. (2023). Research on decompostion method of relational database oriented to microservice refactoring. In 2023 24th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS) (pp. 282–285). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.34385/proc.75.PS2-06
Jin, W., Liu, T., Cai, Y., Kazman, R., Mo, R., & Zheng, Q. (2021). Service candidate identification from monolithic systems based on execution traces. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 47(5), 987–1007. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2910531
Kalia, A. K., Xiao, J., Krishna, R., Sinha, S., Vukovic, M., & Banerjee, D. (2021). Mono2Micro: A practical and effective tool for decomposing monolithic Java applications to microservices. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 1214–1224). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3473915
Kimmel, P. (2008). Manual de UML. McGraw-Hill Interamericana.
Krause, A., Zirkelbach, C., Hasselbring, W., Lenga, S., & Kröger, D. (2020). Microservice decomposition via static and dynamic analysis of the monolith. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) (pp. 9–16). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA-C50368.2020.00011
Laigner, R., Zhou, Y., Salles, M. A. V., Liu, Y., & Kalinowski, M. (2021). Data management in microservices: State of the practice, challenges, and research directions. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 14(13), 3348–3361. https://doi.org/10.14778/3484224.3484232
Lewis, J., & Fowler, M. (2014, March 25). Microservices: A definition of this new architectural term. Martin Fowler. https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
Maharjan, R., Sooksatra, K., Cerny, T., Rajbhandari, Y., & Shrestha, S. (2025). A case study on monolith to microservices decomposition with variational autoencoder-based graph neural network. Future Internet, 17(7), Article 303. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17070303
Mazlami, G., Cito, J., & Leitner, P. (2017). Extraction of microservices from monolithic software architectures. In 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) (pp. 524–531). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS.2017.61
Newman, S. (2015). Building microservices: Designing fine-grained systems. O’Reilly Media.
Parr, T. (2013). The definitive ANTLR 4 reference. Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Richardson, C. (2018). Microservices patterns: With examples in Java. Manning.
Richardson, C. (n.d.). Pattern: Database per service. Microservices.io. Retrieved June 22, 2026, from https://microservices.io/patterns/data/database-per-service.html
Shapiro, S. S., & Wilk, M. B. (1965). An analysis of variance test for normality (complete samples). Biometrika, 52(3/4), 591–611. https://doi.org/10.2307/2333709
Volynsky, E., Mehmed, M., & Krusche, S. (2022). Architect: A framework for the migration to microservices. In M. H. Miraz, G. Southal, M. Ali, & A. Ware (Eds.), 2022 International Conference on Computing, Electronics and Communications Engineering (iCCECE) (pp. 71–76). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/iCCECE55162.2022.9875096
Wilcoxon, F. (1945). Individual comparisons by ranking methods. Biometrics Bulletin, 1(6), 80–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/3001968
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 International Journal of Combinatorial Optimization Problems and Informatics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.