Time travel in a scientific array database

In this paper, we present TimeArr, a new storage manager for an array database. TimeArr supports the creation of a sequence of versions of each stored array and their exploration through two types of time travel operations: selection of a specific version of a (sub)-array and a more general extraction of a (sub)-array history, in the form of a series of (sub)-array versions. TimeArr contributes a combination of array-specific storage techniques to efficiently support these operations. To speed-up array exploration, TimeArr further introduces two additional techniques. The first is the notion of approximate time travel with two types of operations: approximate version selection and approximate history. For these operations, users can tune the degree of approximation tolerable and thus trade-off accuracy and performance in a principled manner. The second is to lazily create short connections, called skip links, between the same (sub)-arrays at different versions with similar data patterns to speed up the selection of a specific version. We implement TimeArr within the SciDB array processing engine and demonstrate its performance through experiments on two real datasets from the astronomy and earth sciences domains.