“A Brief History of Temporal Data Management” from Managing Time in Relational Databases

Temporal data management is not a new development. From the earliest days of business data processing (as it was called back then), transactions were captured in a transaction log and the files and tables those transactions were applied to were periodically backed up. With those backups and logfiles, we could usually recreate what the data looked like at any point in time along either of the temporal dimensions we will be discussing. Indeed, together they contain all the “raw material” needed to support fully bi-temporal data management. As we will see in this chapter, what has changed about temporal data management, over the decades, is accessibility to temporal data. These days, it takes less effort to get to temporal data than it used to, and it takes less time as well. But significant additional progress is possible, and computer scientists are working on it.We are, too. Our work has led to this book, and to the software we are developing to implement its concepts.

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