Database Technology for Processing Temporal Data (Invited Paper)

: Despite the ubiquity of temporal data and considerable research on processing such data, database systems largely remain designed for processing the current state of some modeled reality. More recently, we have seen an increasing interest in processing historical or temporal data. The SQL:2011 standard introduced some temporal features, and commercial database management systems have started to offer temporal functionalities in a step-by-step manner. There has also been a proposal for a more fundamental and comprehensive solution for sequenced temporal queries, which allows a tight integration into relational database systems, thereby taking advantage of existing query optimization and evaluation technologies. New challenges for processing temporal data arise with multiple dimensions of time and the increasing amounts of data, including time series data that represent a special kind of temporal data. Abstract Despite the ubiquity of temporal data and considerable research on processing such data, database systems largely remain designed for processing the current state of some modeled reality. More recently, we have seen an increasing interest in processing historical or temporal data. The SQL:2011 standard introduced some temporal features, and commercial database management systems have started to offer temporal functionalities in a step-by-step manner. There has also been a proposal for a more fundamental and comprehensive solution for sequenced temporal queries, which allows a tight integration into relational database systems, thereby taking advantage of existing query optimization and evaluation technologies. New challenges for processing temporal data arise with multiple dimensions of time and the increasing amounts of data, including time series data that represent a special kind of temporal data.