Managing Time in Relational Databases

Managing Time in Relational Databases: How to Design, Update and Query Temporal Data introduces basic concepts that will enable businesses to develop their own framework for managing temporal data. It discusses the management of uni-temporal and bi-temporal data in relational databases, so that they can be seamlessly accessed together with current data; the encapsulation of temporal data structures and processes; ways to implement temporal data management as an enterprise solution; and the internalization of pipeline datasets.

The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 traces the history of temporal data management and presents a taxonomy of bi-temporal data management methods. Part 2 provides an introduction to Asserted Versioning, covering the origins of Asserted Versioning; core concepts of Asserted Versioning; the schema common to all asserted version tables, as well as the various diagrams and notations used in the rest of the book; and how the basic scenario works when the target of that activity is an asserted version table. Part 3 deals with designing, maintaining, and querying asserted version databases. It discusses the design of Asserted Versioning databases; temporal transactions; deferred assertions and other pipeline datasets; Allen relationships; and optimizing Asserted Versioning databases.

Author Biography

Tom Johnston is an independent consultant specializing in enterprise data architecture, and in relational, object-oriented and data warehouse modeling in various industries, including telecommunications, health care, banking, retailing and transportation. He is also a regular columnist for DMReview and other industry-leading magazines and journals. His Web site is www.MindfulData.org. Randall Weis, founder and CEO of InBase, Inc, has more than 25 years of experience in IT and IT management, specializing in enterprise data architecture. Weis’ technical expertise is in sophisticated, multi-tiered systems. He has designed logical and physical data models and implemented several high profile, very large database (VLDB) systems in the financial and insurance industries. These systems have had very stringent performance and real-time history requirements. His software development company, InBase, Inc., has developed software and Web sites used by some of the nations largest companies. Weis has been a presenter at various user groups, including Guide, Share, Midwest Database Users Group and Camp IT Expo. His technique for modeling history, retro activity and future dating has been reviewed and approved for the physical implementation of IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA).