Spatio-temporal database support for legacy applications
Michael H. Böhlen, Christian S. Jensen, Bjørn Skjellaug · 1998
In areas such as finance, marketing, and property and resource management, many database applications manage spatio-temporal data.These applications typically run on top of a relational DBMS and manage spatio-temporal data either using the DBMS, which provides little support, or employ the services of a proprietary system that co-exists with the DBMS, but is separate from and not integrated with the DBMS.This wealth of applications may benefit substantially from built-in, integrated spatio-temporal DBMS support.Providing a foundation for such support is an important and substantial challenge.This paper initially defines technical requirements to a spatio-temporal DBMS aimed at protecting business investments in the existing legacy applications and at reusing personnel expertise.These requirements provide a foundation for making it economically feasible to migrate legacy applications to a spatio-temporal DBMS.The paper next presents the design of the core of a spatio-temporal, multi-dimensional extension to SQL--92, called STSQL, that satisfies the requirements.STSQL does so by supporting so-called upward compatible, dimensional upward compatible, reducible, and non-reducible queries.In particular, dimensional upward compatibility and reducibility were designed to address migration concerns and complement proposals based on abstract data types.