National Science Foundation
Research Initiation Award
Project Title: Support of Historical References in Databases
Vassilis J. Tsotras
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Polytechnic University
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Project Award Information
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Award Number: NSF IRI-9111271
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Duration: Aug. 1991- Aug. 1994.
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Title: Support of Historical References in Databases
Project Summary
Supporting historical references is an important problem
in several areas of computer science and engineering. The significance
of the database versioning problem (i.e., keeping and accessing old versions)
has been particularly mentioned in recent advances in the database community.
In the rapidly growing area of object oriented programming, historical
references enable programmers to create new objects based on previous object
versions. Traditional approaches to supporting historical references require
either large space or long reconstruction times, making the extensive use
of such references prohibitive. This project provides efficient support
of historical references, i.e., fast reconstruction to any past state without
sacrificing a large amount of storage space. New, optimal ways are investigated
to compress temporal data, while still providing practically random access
to any past reference on these data. Moreover, the problems of distributing
the history, keeping the history of a system that evolves like a graph,
keeping histories in limited space and other general historical queries
(not indexed by time but instead using historical correlation) are analyzed.
The results of this project will greatly impact the use of the recorded
past history for different programmers or database users. Other applications
of these results to be considered, include network management tools, animation
storing and archiving the UNIX directory system.