An Empirical Study of the Performance of Temporal Relational Databases

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Goralwalla, Iqbal
  • Ozsu, M. Tamer
  • Tansel, Abdullah

• Technical report TR94-15. In this paper we describe an implementation of a temporal relational database management system based on attribute timestamping. For this purpose we modify an existing software which supports set-valued attributes. The algebraic language of the system includes relational algebra operators, restructuring operators and temporal operators. We use this system to carry out a performance evaluation of different types of temporal databases: databases using attribute timestamping, databases using tuple timestamping where relations are in temporal normal form and databases using tuple timestamping where a single relation is used. We run sample queries against these types of temporal databases and measure processing time of these queries. This study verifies that the major performance trade off is between the restructuring (unpack) operation needed in databases using attribute timestamping and the join operation needed in databases using tuple timestamping. Furthermore, keeping all temporal tuples in one single relation does not prove to be an effective alternative. | TRID-ID TR94-15

• Date created

  1994

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Attribute timestamping
  • Tuple timestamping
  • Database Systems
  • Temporal queries
  • Temporal databases

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3PK0776V

• License

  Attribution 3.0 International