A Foundation for Vacuuming Temporal Databases

Janne Skyt, Christian Søndergaard Jensen, L. Mark

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningpeer review

24 Citationer (Scopus)

Abstract

A wide range of real-world database applications, including financial and medical applications, are faced with accountability and traceability requirements. These requirements lead to the replacement of the usual update-in-place policy by an append-only policy that retain all previous states in the database. This policy result in so-called transaction-time databases which are ever-growing. A variety of physical storage structures and indexing techniques as well as query languages have been proposed for transaction-time databases, but the support for physical removal of data, termed vacuuming, has only received little attention. Such vacuuming is called for by, e.g., the laws of many countries and the policies of many businesses. Although necessary, with vacuuming, the database’s perfect recollection of the past may be compromised via, e.g., selective removal of records pertaining to past states. This paper provides a semantic foundation for the vacuuming of transaction-time databases. The main focus is to establish a foundation for the correct processing of queries and updates against vacuumed databases. However, options for user, application, and database interactions in response to queries and updates against vacuumed data are also outlined.
Udgivelsesdato: JAN
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Vol/bind44
Udgave nummer1
Sider (fra-til)1-29
Antal sider29
ISSN1041-4347
StatusUdgivet - 2003

Emneord

  • transaction-time databases
  • physical removal
  • Vacuuming
  • logical deletion

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