Managing Time in Relational Databases

Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc.. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Chapter Contents

1. A Brief History of Temporal Data Management11

2. A Taxonomy of Bi-Temporal Data Management Methods27

Historical data first manifested itself as the backups and logfiles we kept and hoped to ignore. We hoped to ignore those datasets because if we had to use them, it meant that something had gone wrong, and we had to recover a state of the database prior to when that happened. Later, as data storage and access technology made it possible to manage massively larger volumes of data than ever before, we brought much of that historical data on-line and organized it in two different ways. On the one hand, backups were stacked on top of one another and turned into data warehouses. ...