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Supporting Transaction Time Databases

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Temporal database; Multi-version database

Definition

The temporal concepts glossary maintained at http://www.cs.aau.dk/∼csj/Glossary/ defines transaction time as: “The transaction time of a database fact is the time when the fact is current in the database and may be retrieved.” A transaction time database thus stores versions of database records or tuples, each of which has a start time and an end time, delimiting the time range during which they represent the current versions of database facts. As each version is the result of transactions, the times associated with the version are the times for the transaction starting the version (the start time) and for the transaction ending the version (the end time). These transaction times are required to agree with the serialization order of the transaction, so that the database can present a transaction consistent view of the facts being stored.

Historical Background

Postgres was the first database system that supported transaction...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    David Lomet

Authors
  1. David Lomet
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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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Lomet, D. (2009). Supporting Transaction Time Databases. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_381

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