Schedule - FOSDEM PGDay 2015

Temporal data and time travel

Date: 2015-01-30
Time: 14:20–15:10
Room: Place Sablon
Level: Beginner

One of the most remarkable new features in the SQL:2011 standard are the so-called temporal tables. As opposed to classical relational tables, these "history-aware" tables keep track of their earlier state. They can be queried with a SELECT ... FROM ... AS OF ...query which returns the content of that table as it looked like at the given time instant. PostgreSQL included temporal table support in version 9.2. Also some other relational databases (notably DB2 and Oracle) added temporal support in their recent versions. This presentation goes into some of the technical details of the two flavours (system time and business time) of temporal tables through several use cases, explains how they can be created and manipulated, discusses performance aspects, and compares the PG implementation with the DB2 and Oracle ones.

Speaker

Peter Vanroose

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