Indexing Temporal Relations for Range-Duration Queries

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.