Coalescing in Temporal Databases

Coalescing is a unary operator applicable to temporal databases; it is similar to duplicate elimination in conventional databases. Tuples in a temporal relation that agree on the explicit attribute values and that have adjacent or overlapping time periods are candidates for coalescing. Uncoalesced relations can arise in many ways, e.g., via a projection or union operator, or by not enforcing coalescing on update or insertion. In this paper we show how semantically superfluous coalescing can be eliminated. We then turn to efficiently performing coalescing. We sketch a variety of iterative and non-iterative approaches, via SQL and embedded SQL, demonstrating that coalescing can be formulated in SQL-89. Detailed performance studies show that all such approaches are quite expensive. We propose a spectrum of coalescing algorithms within a DBMS, based on nested-loop, explicit partitioning, explicit sorting, temporal sorting, temporal partitioning, and combined explicit/temporal sorting, and summarize a performance study involving a subset of these algorithms. The study shows that coalescing can be implemented with reasonable efficiency, and with modest development cost. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 22nd VLDB Conference Mumbai(Bombay), India, 1996 Name Title Ron President [1981,~~,Z~~~98~,~~,~~~ Ron President [1985/01/20~1989/01/20) Figure 1: Uncoalesced Valid-Time Relation