Performance of Querying Temporal Attributes in Object-Relational Databases

In this paper we evaluate a model for temporal data utilizing the benefits of object-relational database systems (ORDBS). In particular we show how attribute timestamping can be efficiently implemented in state-of-theart ORDBS. The attribute timestamping concept is based on introducing user-specific types for temporal versions of datatypes. Moreover on the physical level we make use of user-defined index structures; in particular adapted spatial indexes based on generalized search trees are applied. These index structures greatly improve performance of important operators on both valid and bitemporal datatypes and show the effectiveness of this approach.