Design issues in transaction-time temporal object database systems

Object database systems (ODBs) are an attractive alternative to relational database systems, especially in application areas where the modeling power or performance of relational database systems is insufficient. These applications typically maintain large amounts of data. Frequently, some of the data is temporal data. For the temporal data, the whole history of the individual objects is kept, and data is never deleted. The area of temporal ODBs is still immature, and there are many design issues that need to be solved in order to be able to achieve the desired performance. In this paper, we discuss some temporal ODB research issues and possible solutions related to object storage, object management, main memory buffering, and language bindings