Synonyms
Bitemporal data model; Historical data model; Transaction-time data model; Valid-time data model
Definition
A “data model” consists of two components, namely a set of objects and a language for querying those objects [4]. In a temporal data model the objects vary over time, and the operations in some sense “know” about time. Focus has been on the design of data models where the time references capture valid time, or transaction time, or a combination of both (for bitemporal data).
Historical Background
Almost all real-world databases contain time-referenced data. Few interesting databases are entirely stagnant, and when the modeled reality changes, the database must be updated. Usually at least the start time of currently valid data are captured, though most databases also retain previous data.
Two decades of research into temporal databases have unequivocally shown that a time-referencing table, containing certain kinds of time-valued columns that capture one or more...
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Recommended Reading
Clifford J, Croker A, Tuzhilin A. On completeness of historical relational query languages. ACM Trans Database Syst. 1994;19(1):64–16.
Jensen CS, Soo MD, Snodgrass RT. Unifying temporal data models via a conceptual model. Inf Syst. 1994;19(7):513–47.
Snodgrass RT. Developing time-oriented database applications in SQL. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 1999.
Tsichritzis DC, Lochovsky FH. Data models. Software series. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall; 1982.
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Jensen, C.S., Snodgrass, R.T. (2018). Temporal Data Models. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_394
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_394
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