Bitemporal Data: making it happened in Postgres.

The first attempts to include a time dimension into relational data go back to early 80’s, when the first works of Dr. Richard Snodrass were published. Since that time numerous scientists contributed to further development of the temporal relational theory.

Nowadays bitemporal data management is becoming mainstream: IBM’s DB2, Teradata and Oracle - all started to support bitemporal data. We believe that Postgres provides even more capabilities to support time dimensions than any industrial DBMS due to the already existing support of ranges, including the time ranges and implementation of gist indexes with exclusion.

We base our implementation of bitemporal time on the concepts highlighted in the book by Managing Time in Relational Databases by Johnson and Weis. Following their Asserted Versioning Framework (AVF) we introduce the concepts of effective time and asserted time and implement all basic operations on bitemporal tables.

This talk will present our research and development in progress, including the concepts and operations, which are already successfully implemented, as well as what’s in works and our current challenges.

bi_temporal_in_pg.pptx