Approximate temporal aggregation

Abstract

Temporal aggregate queries retrieve summarized information about records with time-evolving attributes. Existing approaches have at least one of the following shortcomings: (i) they incur large space requirements, (ii) they have high processing cost and (iii) they are based on complex structures, which are not available in commercial systems. We solve these problems by approximation techniques with bounded error. We propose two methods: the first one is based on multiversion B-trees and has logarithmic worst-case query cost, while the second technique uses off-the-shelf B- and R-trees, and achieves the same performance in the expected case. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed methods consume an order of magnitude less space than their competitors and are significantly faster, even for cases that the permissible error bound is very small.