On the semantics of “now” in databases

  • Authors:
  • James Clifford;Curtis Dyreson;Tomás Isakowitz;Christian S. Jensen;Richard Thomas Snodgrass

  • Affiliations:
  • New York Univ., New York, NY;James Cook Univ., Townsville, Australia;New York Univ., New York, NY;Aalborg Univ., Aalborg, Denmark;Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Although “now” is expressed in SQL and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP within queries, this value cannot be stored in the database. How ever, this notion of an ever-increasing current-time value has been reflected in some temporal data models by inclusion of database-resident variables, such as “now” “until-changed, ” “**,” “@,” and “-”. Time variables are very desirable, but their used also leads to a new type of database, consisting of tuples with variables, termed a variable database.