Temporally Enhanced Database Design
Christian S. Jensen, Richard Thomas Snodgrass · The MIT Press eBooks · 2000
Introduction The design of appropriate database schemas is crucial to the effective use of database technology and the construction of information systems that exploit this technology. The process of appropriately capturing the temporal aspects of the modeled reality in the database schema---be it based on, e.g., the relational model or the ER model---is complex and error prone, and the resulting schemas are often overly difficult to understand. With a focus on the temporal aspects of database schemas, this chapter explores the technical foundation for simplifying the conceptual design process. Specifically, we propose to separate the design of conceptual database schemas for time-oriented applications into two stages. In the first stage, the underlying temporal aspects are ignored, resulting in the design of simple, single-state (so-called non-temporal) schemas. In the second stage, these initial schemas are annotated with their temporal aspects. These annotations may imply