A temporal object query language
Leonidas Fegaras, Ramez A. Elmasri · 2002
One of the main reasons that current commercial DBMSs provide only minimal support for temporal concepts is the size and complexity involved. Object-oriented databases, on the other hand, were developed to deal with complex database applications. Because temporal concepts require complex type support and advanced modeling concepts, object-oriented databases are excellent candidates for realization of temporal databases without requiring fundamental extensions to the basic data model. The ODMG (Object Data Management Group) has proposed a standard for object-oriented databases, including a standard object model, an object query language (OQL), and an object definition language (ODL). These do not include temporal support except at the data type level, as in SQL2. We present a language extension to OQL to accommodate time information. Our goal is not to propose a new temporal query language, but to incorporate temporal features into the existing OQL framework.