English

Indexing Temporal Relations for Range-Duration Queries

Databases 2022-06-16 v1

Abstract

Temporal information plays a crucial role in many database applications, however support for queries on such data is limited. We present an index structure, termed RD-index, to support range-duration queries over interval timestamped relations, which constrain both the range of the tuples' positions on the timeline and their duration. RD-index is a grid structure in the two-dimensional space, representing the position on the timeline and the duration of timestamps, respectively. Instead of using a regular grid, we consider the data distribution for the construction of the grid in order to ensure that each grid cell contains approximately the same number of intervals. RD-index features provable bounds on the running time of all the operations, allow for a simple implementation, and supports very predictable query performance. We benchmark our solution on a variety of datasets and query workloads, investigating both the query rate and the behavior of the individual queries. The results show that RD-index performs better than the baselines on range-duration queries, for which it is explicitly designed. Furthermore, it outperforms specialized indexes also on workloads containing queries constraining either only the duration or the range.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.07428,
  title  = {Indexing Temporal Relations for Range-Duration Queries},
  author = {Matteo Ceccarello and Anton Dignös and Johann Gamper and Christina Khnaisser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.07428},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:52:13.607Z