Extending Trigger-by-Example Approach to Support Time Events

Abstract

An interesting type of objects in the SQL standard and database systems are triggers which are nowadays being widely used. The capability of automatic reaction to certain events is of great importance. Although the idea of triggers seems very promising, their complexity and variety of different programming languages used for their implementation hinder their wider use. To write more complex triggers becomes a difficult task and new methods for easier implementation are required. An interesting approach to resolve this flaw was already presented, so called Trigger-By-Example approach; in this paper we extend this idea in a way that triggers based upon time events are supported too i.e. that triggers based on time events can be built automatically in a specified database management system. The paper will explain the idea and show how this was done in PostgreSQL database management system.