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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3945–3949Cite as

Temporal Database

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Synonyms

Historical database; Time-oriented database

Definition

A temporal database is a collection of time-referenced data. In such a database, the time references capture some temporal aspect of the data; put differently, the data are timestamped. Two temporal aspects are prevalent. The time references may capture either the past and current states of the database, yielding a transaction-time database; they may capture states of the reality being modeled by the data, yielding a valid-time database; or they may capture both aspects of the data, yielding a bitemporal database.

Historical Background

“Time” is a fundamental concept that pervades all aspects of daily life. As one indicator, a recent study by Oxford University Press found that the word “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language. The nouns “year” and “day” rank third and fifth in the study.

Moving to a database context, the capture and representation of time-varying information go back literally thousands...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Christian S. Jensen

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Richard T. Snodgrass

  3. Dataware Ventures, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Richard T. Snodgrass

Authors
  1. Christian S. Jensen
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  2. Richard T. Snodgrass
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Christian S. Jensen or Richard T. Snodgrass .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Richard T. Snodgrass

  2. Aalborg University, Aalborg Øst, Denmark

    Christian S. Jensen

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Jensen, C.S., Snodgrass, R.T. (2018). Temporal Database. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_395

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