Temporal Data Management
Pages : 950-955Download PDF
A temporal database records time-varying information. Most database applications are temporal in nature, e.g., scheduling applications such as airline, train, and hotel reservations and project management, and scientific applications such as weather monitoring, financial applications such as portfolio management, accounting, and banking, record-keeping applications such as personnel, medical-record, and inventory management,. Recently there has been a surge of interest in temporal data, because memory and magnetic disk storage costs are rapidly decreasing, and the advances in optical disk technology. In the past, temporal data was mostly delegated to archival storage or discarded altogether because it was too expensive or impractical to access them on-line. While it was recognized that historical data are of great importance to applications such as data analysis for policy decisions, such applications were not viewed as essential for a day-to-day operation. As a result, existing data management systems are designed to support the view of the most current version of the database. The dominant approach is one of data being updated, deleted, and inserted in order to maintain the current version. A wide range of database applications manage time-varying data. In contrast, existing database technology provides little support for managing such data. The research area of temporal databases aims to change this state of affairs by characterizing the semantics of temporal data and providing expressive and efficient ways to model, store, and query temporal data.
Keywords: Temporal database records etc.