Do you know of anyone working on bi-temporal support for PostgreSQL,
especially native support in PostgreSQL itself? Any comments from
anyone who's looked into or been interested in this in the past?
A while back, some folks pointed out[1] an excellent book[2] by
Snodgrass[3], Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL.
However, the central thing I took from that book is that _no way_ do I
ever want to try to do any serious, practical bi-temporal work in
standard SQL-92. I'd want either a good translation layer to take
nice temporal DDL and DML and convert it to standard SQL, or
preferably, native temporal support in the RDBMS itself.
Does any such thing exist? Is anyone out their working on temporal
support for, say, PostgreSQL? Anyone know of anything interesting?
The only thing I really found on the net was BtPgsql[4], a Ruby
bi-temporal emulation layer for PostgreSQL.
There are or were some proposed standards for this temporal stuff,
TSQL2[5] and SQL3/Temporal[6], but their current status sounds rather
confused. Note that last link says in part, "Due to disagreements
within the ISO committee as to where temporal support in SQL should
go, the project responsible for temporal support was canceled near the
end of 2001. Hence, the working draft, "Part 7, SQL/Temporal" is in
limbo."!
[1] http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=31761
[2] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558604367/
[3] http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/timecenter/timecenter.html
[4] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=btpgsql
[5] http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/tsql2.html
[6] http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/sql3.html
FYI, I also asked this question in another forum, here:
http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=105737
--
Andrew Piskorski <atp@piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com
