A comparative study of indexing technique for temporal database

Abstract

Despite the extensive research has been performed in temporal database area over the last twenty years, it still remains a great challenge in managing temporal database. Temporal database management systems (TDBMS) aim to make temporal data management easier and more familiar to users or applications. The concepts of storing unique attribute in the database is a fundamental, but when adding the temporal element raises some intriguing questions and new difficulties. Temporal database has to retrieve the past, present and future data. Therefore, the database becomes larger and more complex. Furthermore, the data structure, access method and query processing are to be considered. Recently, one relevant issue has captivated many researchers interest is low response time for data retrieval. Indexing technique is one approach that can improve the query performance and provide faster response time. Here, several indexing techniques for temporal database have been reviewed, also summarize their implementation and then compare against each other.