A temporal database management system implemented on top of a conventional database

Temporal data models have proven to be convenient to specify applications, allowing the representation of the temporal evolution of data. Several temporal data models were proposed in the last 20 years with this purpose, but no commercial implementation of a temporal database is still available. This paper presents an integrated temporal database environment implemented on top of a conventional database. Using this environment, a user can handle the specification, the data definition and the queries as though the database implements the temporal data model. The environment performs the mapping from the temporal conceptual schema to the correspondent database, and of the queries expressed in the temporal query language to SQL. Data definition is controlled based on the state transition rules of the temporal data model, keeping thus the temporal integrity of the database. The underlying conventional database keeps transparent to the user.