Time and Relational Theory, 2nd Edition

Preface

This book is a major revision—in fact, a total rewrite—of an earlier one by the same authors. That earlier book was published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2003, under the title Temporal Data and the Relational Model. But the present book is so different from the previous one (except, to some extent, in its overall structure) that it doesn’t seem reasonable to refer to it as just a second edition. (We’ve even given it a different title, partly for that reason.) As a consequence, we won’t make any attempt in the text to call out specific points of difference with respect to that earlier book. Nor will we do what’s usually done with the preface to a new edition, which is first to repeat the preface from the previous edition and then to explain ...