Un mètode per a la comprovació de restriccions d'integritat en bases de dades deductives bitemporals

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis mainly deals with temporal and deductive databases areas and the aim is to obtain a method for integrity constraint checking in bitemporal deductive databases, analyzing the temporal integrity constraint behavior. The existence of a transaction time dimension is especially useful to reduce the number of transition rules. In the valid time dimension, the temporal dependence of database predicate terms has been explored. Moreover, this Ph.D. thesis provides some research advances bringing together the areas of temporal databases and data warehouses. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the problem and the related work of this Ph.D. thesis main area. Chapter 2 presents temporal databases, and chapter 3 deductive databases. Chapter 4 introduces the study of temporal deductive database transaction behavior, explaining the concept of coherent transaction. This concept is used to reject transactions without more information requirements. Chapter 5 defines a new taxonomy of temporal integrity constraints to achieve a better understanding of why constraints are required and a best way to define them using first-order logic. In order to meet these goals, we have studied temporal integrity constraint taxonomies existing on the temporal database area and other deeply related areas such as multiversion databases. These works have been adapted and further developed to cover the scope of bitemporal deductive databases. Chapter 6 proposes an integrity constraint checking method for bitemporal deductive databases that derives a set of transition rules for each temporal integrity constraint. Then, Standard Linear Deduction with Negation as Failure Resolution is used to verify that a transaction does not violate any constraint before the transaction is allowed to commit. The set of transition rules obtained is very large; therefore, a carefully analysis of the integrity constraints using the taxonomy introduced above drastically reduces the number of rules. This chapter includes some examples of this new reduced set of transition rules and application examples of our integrity constraint checking method in bitemporal deductive databases. In chapters 7 and 8, we present our current and further work. In chapter 7, we identify a new type of predicate term dependent of time. This new type of term, named temporally dependent term, is formally defined and deeply studied in order to find its properties and its applicability to queries and integrity constraints. In chapter 8, we explain how to combine temporal database and data warehouse areas. Finally, chapter 9 provides conclusions and further work.