An XML-based methodology for parametric temporal database model implementation

Parametric data model is one of dimensional data models. It defines attributes as functions, modeling a real world object into a single tuple in a database. Such one-to-one correspondence between an object in the real world and a tuple provides various advantages in modeling dimensional data, avoiding self-joins which frequently appear in temporal data models which fragment an object into multiple tuples. Despite its modeling advantages, it is impractical to implement the parametric data model on top of conventional database systems because of the data model’s variable attribute sizes. However, such implementation challenge can be resolved by XML because XML is flexible for data boundaries. In this paper, we present an XML-based implementation methodology for the parametric temporal data model. In our implementation, we develop our own XML storage called CanStoreX (Canonical Storage for XML) and build the temporal database system on top of the CanStoreX.