An Efficient Index Structure for Bitemporal Databases

摘要

Most applications require storing multiple versions of data and involve temporal semantics in their schema. This requires maintenance and querying of temporal relations. A bitemporal DBMS simplifies the development and maintenance of such applications by moving temporal support from the application to the DBMS engine. The success of such bitemporal DBMSs relies mainly on the availability of high performance indices that handle update and search operations efficiently. We propose a bitemporal index that partitions the bitemporal space into four subspaces according to the end value of the temporal intervals. This results in separating the keys that have variable intervals from those that have fixed intervals. Our experiments show that the proposed index structure has better search performance.