TOWARDS AN ALGEBRA OF HISTORICAL RELATIONAL DATABASES

Abstract

In search of the appropriate semantics for the inclusion of structures and operations that will meet the needs of a wide class of users interested in a database system supporting temporal views of their data, the paper includes a discussion of many problems that must be addressed. Salient features of the author’s Historical Relational Database Model (HRDBM) are presented, and some subtle nuances that time brings to the development of an historical relational algebra are illustrated. Along the way, a number of observations and guidelines are presented that may help guide the search for an historically relationally complete database model and query languages.