Provenance Management in Databases Under Schema Evolution

Since changes caused by database updates combine with the internal changes caused by database schema evolution, an integrated provenance management for data and metadata represents a key requirement for modern information systems. In this paper, we introduce the Archived Metadata and Provenance Manager (AM&PM) system which addresses this requirement by (i) extending the Information Schema with the capability of representing the provenance of the schema and other metadata, (ii) providing a simple time-stamp based representation of the provenance of the actual data, and (iii) supporting powerful queries on the provenance of the data and the history of the metadata.