Temporal Requirements
In this chapter, I argue that the common business request to keep “history” for one or more tables in a database can only be satisfied with bitemporal data. This is an important fact that is seldom understood by the IT personnel whose job it is to satisfy the request. Best practices for implementing the history requirement almost always do so by using unitemporal tables. The slowly-changing dimensions of star schemas are unitemporal tables. The timestamped copies of operational data, moved into historical data warehouses, are unitemporal copies. But neither can provide an historically complete record.
Keywords
ambiguous-time table; assertion time; assertion; bitemporal table; correction; decoalesce; history table; ...
Get Bitemporal Data now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
