Chapter 1

Bitemporal Data

Preliminaries

This chapter begins by distinguishing between objects and events, and explains how change can be represented as either a succession of states of objects, or as a succession of events in which those objects take part. This chapter also describes the conventions used in this book to show examples of database tables, and of rows in those tables.

Keywords

assertion-time period; bitemporal table; clock tick; closed time period; conventional table; event table; granularity; inscribe; interval; life history; nontemporal table; object table; referent; schema row; state-time period; temporal entity integrity; temporal foreign key; temporal primary key; temporal referential integrity; temporal transaction; temporal ...