A temporal transparency database application development environment

Abstract

Temporal database concepts have been around for a long time. However, the implementation of temporal databases for practical database applications is limited. One reason is that for most practitioners, the temporal database concepts are difficult to understand. It is also very hard to implement the concepts on conventional relational databases using SQL. Therefore, projects that try to implement it face many problems, such as team members can not tune in with the new concept, delays due to training, lost of productivity and power users can not directly query databases. The objective of this research project is to create an architecture that allows temporal databases to coexist with normal databases. Temporal database application developers can use a temporal version of SQL to develop their applications. Concurrently, applications developed for conventional databases use the standard SQL on current databases and can also maintain temporal databases without the awareness of the existence of the temporal ones thus, achieve temporal transparency. Users, administrators and team members can utilize the databases without extensive training on the temporal relational database implementation. A software development environment is developed according to the architecture.