Transformation of Relational Databases to Transaction-Time Temporal Databases

In recent years, versioning has emerged as a very popular operating system feature for file systems. Some of these systems can provide user friendly "go back in time" feature, where the user can see exactly how file system looked on the dates he specifies. The advantages of these techniques are however, not present or supported by most relational database systems used worldwide. Using versioning in relational databases we can decrease the complexity of information systems, provide new functionality, increase the security and usually decrease the administration costs. In this paper we present an approach to transformation of the snapshot relational database to temporal database with tuple time-stamping. The transformation is achieved by automatic database schema extension and modification. Information system which uses the transformed database schema remain intact, or requires minimal modifications. The automatic transformation can be applied on PostgreSQL relational databases, however similar or same transformations can be used in other relational databases.