A temporal approach to managing schema evolution in object database systems

Abstract

The issues of schema evolution and temporal object models are generally considered to be orthogonal and are handled independently. However, to properly model applications that need incremental design and experimentation, the evolutionary histories of the schema objects should be traceable rather than corrective so that historical queries can be supported. In this paper we propose a method for managing schema changes, and propagating these changes to object instances by exploiting the functionality of a temporal object model. The result is a uniform treatment of schema evolution and temporal support for many object database management systems applications that require both.