DEVELOPING TIME-ORIENTED DATABASE APPLICATIONS IN SQL. - CD-Rom included

"I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in temporal data - either designing and building databases that record information over time, or just understanding the concepts that underlie representing temporal information.... an excellent job of organizing and summarizing this important area." - From the foreword by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research "... a long time in the making, not only because the subject matter can seem overwhelmingly complex if not presented carefully, but also because of the great number of examples that Snodgrass has taken from real application systems and translated into standard SQL." - From the foreword by Jim Melton, Oracle Corporation Whether you're a database designer, programmer, analyst, or manager, you've probably encountered some of the challenges - and experienced some of the frustrations - associated with time - varying data. Where do you turn to fix the problem and see that it doesn't happen again? In Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL, a leading SQL researcher teaches you effective techniques for designing and building database applications that must integrate past and current data. Written to meet a pervasive, enduring need, this book will be indispensible if you happen to be part of the flurry of activity leading up to Y2K. Features * Offers incisive advice on recording temporal data using SQL data types, defining appropriate integrity constraints, updating temporal tables, and querying temporal tables with interactive and embedded SQL. * Provides case studies detailing real-world problems and solutions in areas such as event data, state-based data, partitioned data, and audit logs. * Contains over 400 code fragments with detailed explanations. Software on CD-ROM The enclosed CD-ROM contains all of the code fragments - implemented for Oracle8 Server, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Microsoft SQL Server, and other systems - and evaluation copies of the programs discussed in the book.