Designing access methods for bitemporal databases

Ashish Kumar

doi:10.1109/69.667079

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Designing access methods for bitemporal databases

1998-01-01

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Ashish Kumar

Vassilis J. Tsotras

Christos Faloutsos

DOI：10.1109/69.667079

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Abstract

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By supporting the valid and transaction time dimensions, bitemporal databases represent reality more accurately than conventional databases. In this paper, we examine the issues involved in designing efficient access methods for bitemporal databases, and propose the partial-persistence and the double-tree methodologies. The partial-persistence methodology reduces bitemporal queries to partial persistence problems for which an efficient access method is then designed. The double-tree methodology sees each bitemporal data object as consisting of two intervals (a valid-time and a transaction-time interval) and divides objects into two categories according to whether the right endpoint of the transaction time interval is already known. A common characteristic of both methodologies is that they take into account the properties of each time dimension. Their performance is compared with a straightforward approach that sees the intervals associated with a bitemporal object as composing one rectangle, which is stored in a single multidimensional access method. Given that some limited additional space is available, our experimental results show that the partial-persistence methodology provides the best overall performance, especially for transaction timeslice queries. For those applications that require ready, off-the-shelf, access methods, the double-tree methodology is a good alternative.

Keywords:

bitemporal databases

access methods

transaction-time

valid-time

data structures

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