XML-based support for database histories and document versions

Current database systems do not provide effective means for archiving the database history and querying past snapshots of the database and its temporal evolution. Better support for temporal applications by database systems represents an important objective that is difficult to achieve, since it requires an integrated solution for technical problems that are challenging on their own, including (i) expressive temporal representations and data models, (ii) powerful languages for temporal queries and snapshot queries, (iii) indexing, clustering and query optimization techniques for managing temporal information efficiently, and (iv) architectures that bring together the different pieces of enabling technology into a robust system.;There is much current interest in publishing and viewing databases as XML documents. The general benefits of this approach follow from the popularity of XML and the tool set available for processing information encoded in this universal standard. In this dissertation, we explore the additional and unique benefits achieved by this approach on temporal database applications. We show that XML with XQuery can provide surprisingly effective solutions to the problem of supporting historical queries on past contents of database relations and their evolution. Indeed, using XML, the histories of database relations can be represented naturally using a temporally grouped data model, and complex temporal queries can be expressed in XQuery without requiring extensions to the current standard.;Therefore, we present the ArchIS system that achieves these benefits. ArchIS' architecture uses (a) XML to support a temporally grouped (virtual) representation of the database history, (b) XQuery to express powerful temporal queries on such views, (c) temporal clustering and indexing techniques for managing the actual historical data in an RDBMS, and (d) SQL/XML for executing the queries on the XML views as equivalent queries on the relational database. Extensive performance studies show that ArchIS is quite effective at storing and retrieving under complex query conditions the transaction-time history of relational databases. By supporting database compression as an option, ArchIS also achieves excellent storage efficiency for archived histories. Therefore, ArchIS delivers full-functionality transaction-time databases without requiring temporal extensions in XML or database standards. Moreover, these techniques can be extended to valid-time and bitemporal databases, where complex temporal queries can also be expressed in standard XQuery.;The temporal modeling and querying approach proposed in this thesis is very general and can be extended to arbitrary XML documents. In our extension, we manage the XML document revision history effectively by (i) representing concisely the successive versions of a document as another XML document that implements a temporally grouped data model, (ii) using structured diff algorithms to build such documents, and (iii) using XQuery to express complex temporal queries on the evolution of the document structure and its content.