Bitemporal Sliding Windows

Abstract

The bitemporal data model associates two time intervals with each record - system time and application time - denoting the validity of the record from the perspective of the database and of the real world, respectively. One issue that has not yet been addressed is how to efficiently answer sliding window queries in this model. In this work, we propose and experimentally evaluate a main-memory index called BiSW that supports sliding windows on system time, application time, and both time attributes simultaneously. Our experimental results show that BiSW outperforms existing approaches in terms of space footprint, maintenance overhead and query performance.