Version Management of Hierarchical Data in Relational Database

Hierarchical data structure is organized into a tree-like structure represented by parent- child relationship. The parent can have many children but each child has only one parent. It is also known as one-to-many relationship. There are many types of data can be represented by hierarchical data structure such as organization structures and programs in academies. In some applications, there is necessary to keep historical data or version that need to be used. Temporal data management is used to handle historical data but cause high data space usage by storing every version data which decrease database efficiency. In this paper, we propose logical design to manage versions of hierarchical data in relational database that that may change overtime but historical data is still needed by reusing duplicated records. This conceptual design can avoid data redundancy and increase database efficiency.