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Temporal Vacuuming

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Data expiration

Definition

Transaction-time temporal databases are inherently append-only resulting, over time, in a large historical sequence of database states. Data vacuuming allows for a strategic, and irrevocable, deletion of obsolete data.

Historical Background

The term vacuuming was first used in relation to databases in the Postgres database system as a mechanism for moving old data to archival storage [10]. It was later refined by Jensen and Mark in the context of temporal databases to refer to the removal of obsolete information [4] and subsequently developed into a comprehensive and usable adjunct to temporal databases [6,8,11]. Data expiration has also been investigated in the context of data warehouses by Garcia-Molina et al. [2] and others [9].

Foundations

In many applications, data about the past needs be retained for further use. This idea can be formalized, at least on the conceptual level, in terms of an append-only transaction-time temporal database or a history...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Chomicki J. Efficient checking of temporal integrity constraints using bounded history encoding. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 20(2):149–186, 1995.

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  2. Garcia-Molina H., Labio W., and Yang J. Expiring data in a warehouse. In Proc. 24th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 1998, pp. 500–511.

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  3. Jensen C. Vacuuming. In The TSQL2 Temporal Query Language, Chapter 23, R. Snodgrass (ed.). Kluwer, New York, 1995, pp. 451–462.

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  4. Jensen C.S. and Mark L. A framework for vacuuming temporal databases. Tech. Rep. CS-TR-2516, University of Maryland at College Park, 1990.

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  5. Schmidt A., Jensen C., and Saltenis S. Expiration times for data management. In Proc. 22nd Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, 2006, p. 36.

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  6. Skyt J. Specification-Based Techniques for the Reduction of Temporal and Multidimensional Data. Ph.D thesis, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, 2001.

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  7. Skyt J. and Jensen C.S. Vacuuming temporal databases. TimeCenter technical report TR-32, Aalborg University, 1998.

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  8. Skyt J., Jensen C.S., and Mark L. A foundation for vacuuming temporal databases. Data Knowl. Eng., 44(1):1–29, 2003.

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  9. Skyt J., Jensen C.S., and Pedersen T.B. Specification-based data reduction in dimensional data warehouses. In Proc. 18th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, 2002, p. 278.

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  10. Stonebraker M. and Rowe L. The design of POSTGRES. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 1986, pp. 340–355.

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  11. Toman D. Expiration of historical databases. In Proc. 8th Int. Symp. Temporal Representation and Reasoning, 2001, pp. 128–135.

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  12. Toman D. Logical data expiration for fixpoint extensions of temporal logics. In Proc. 8th Int. Symp. Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases, 2003, pp. 380–393.

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  13. Toman D. On incompleteness of multi-dimensional first-order temporal logics. In Proc. 10th Int. Symp. Temporal Representation and Reasoning/4th Int. Conf. Temporal Logic, 2003, pp. 99–106.

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  14. Toman D. On construction of holistic synopses under the duplicate semantics of streaming queries. In Proc. 14th Int. Symp. Temporal Representation and Reasoning, 2007, pp. 150–162.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    John F. Roddick

  2. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    David Toman

Authors
  1. John F. Roddick
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  2. David Toman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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F. Roddick, J., Toman, D. (2009). Temporal Vacuuming. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1045

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