Granularity reduction in temporal document databases

With rapidly decreasing storage costs, temporal document databases are now a viable solution in many contexts. However, storing an ever-growing database can still be too costly, and as a consequence it is desirable to be able to physically delete old versions of data. Traditionally, this has been performed by an operation called vacuuming, where the oldest versions are physically deleted or migrated from secondary storage to less costly tertiary storage. In temporal document databases on the other hand, it is often more appropriate to remove intermediate versions instead of removing the oldest versions. We call this operation granularity reduction. In this paper we describe the concept of granularity reduction, and present six strategies for selecting the document versions to eliminate. Three of the strategies have been implemented in the V2 temporal document database system, and in this context we discuss the cost of applying the strategies.