Bitemporal Data

Part 2. Practice

We now have a rich set of concepts with which to understand temporal data and what we are doing when we design, create, populate and query temporal tables in relational databases. Understanding these things, we are less likely to make mistakes with the new temporal capabilities that DBMS vendors are making available, and more likely to minimize the impact of their shortcomings and to maximize the value they provide.

For example, the concept of a referent explains in what way foreign keys and temporal foreign keys are similar. They are similar in that both point to referents. Foreign keys point to referents in tables which are restricted to having only one row for each referent because rows in those tables record only the current ...