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Temporal Joins

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

A temporal join is a join operation on two temporal relations, in which each tuple has additional attributes indicating a time interval. The temporal join predicates include conventional join predicates as well as a temporal constraint that requires the overlap of the intervals of the two joined tuples. The result of a temporal join is a temporal relation.

Besides binary temporal joins that operate on two temporal relations, there are n-ary temporal joins that operate on more than two temporal relations. Besides temporal overlapping, there are other temporal conditions such as “before” and “after” [1]. This entry will concentrate on the binary temporal joins with overlapping temporal condition since most of the previous work has focused on this kind of joins.

Historical Background

In the past, temporal join operators have been defined in different temporal data models; at times the essentially same operators have even been given different names when defined in different data...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Silicon Valley Lab, San Jose, CA, USA

    Dengfeng Gao

Authors
  1. Dengfeng Gao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dengfeng Gao .

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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Gao, D. (2018). Temporal Joins. 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_401

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