Temporal Queries to Complex Objects

Support for temporal data continues to be a requirement posed by many applications such as VLSI design and CAD, but also in conventional applications like banking and sales. The strong demand for complex-object support is known as an inherent fact in design applications, but it also holds for advanced “conventional” applications. Thus, new advanced database management systems should include both features, i.e. should support temporal complex-objects. We show that such a system can be efficiently implemented on top of a (non-temporal) complex-object data model. The central notion of the temporal complex-object data model is a time slice, representing one state of a complex object. Time slices cannot be directly stored, if non-disjunct (i.e. overlapping) complex objects are allowed. We explain the mapping of time slices onto the complex objects supported by the MAD model. Operations on temporal complexobjects are easily transformed into MAD model operations. Furthermore, we reduce the huge storage requirements usually arising from temporal databases.