Comments for Experimental Thoughts

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:54:05 +0000

This can be modeled in a way similar to numbers with only a few significant figures: truncation.

For example, you can use a CHECK constraint like “CHECK(the_month = date_trunc(‘month’, the_month))”. This might be a good use for domains.

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by Scott Bailey

Scott Bailey — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:46:44 +0000

Richard, You can install chronosDB over top of Jeff's period data type. ChronosDB does things like union, minus and intersect non-contiguous sets (arrays of periods)

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by Richard Broersma Jr.

Richard Broersma Jr. — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:02:25 +0000

Yes, either overlapping or touching (is overlapping the same a touching?). Having this would make be a really nice feature that (to me) would simply range queries.

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by David Fetter

David Fetter — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:59:40 +0000

By “continuous ranges,” do you mean something that knows that “melts” two or more overlapping, non-identical intervals into their union? That sounds really neat!

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by Joe

Joe — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:29:17 +0000

Not sure if this falls into TEMPORAL data types, but I’ve found a need for what I call a FUZZY DATE. For example, a blog post may have a precise date, like 2010/03/09, and you may know the precise date of a person’s birth or some other event. However, some events or dates are less precise, e.g., a monthly magazine may have a publication date of March 2010, a quarterly journal may be dated Winter 2010, a book may have simply have a year as copyright date, and sometimes you may only know a historical date only approximately, e.g., circa 1502. You’d still like to order the events/date in some reasonable manner or search for events that took place in March 2010 and find the journal, the magazine and the blog post.

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by Richard Broersma Jr.

Richard Broersma Jr. — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:41:04 +0000

One lesser feature that I believe may be useful would be range aggregates. Rather than simply summing the durations of a range for a group, it would be nice to get a set of continuous ranges for the group.

Comment on Temporal PostgreSQL Roadmap by akretschmer

akretschmer — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:20:48 +0000

I have seen a very interesting presentation from Magnus Hagander (at FOSDEM 2010 Brussels) about this great feature – and i hope, 9.1 will contains this great feature.

I wish you success!

Regards, Andreas

Comment on Scalability and the Relational Model by Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:41:50 +0000

Ideally, you should be able to represent your data in relations even if it is stored in the format you describe.

Unfortunately, existing SQL systems almost universally assume “table = file”. That makes it difficult for you to store the data in the format which suits your needs, and still use SQL.

Comment on Scalability and the Relational Model by Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:34:25 +0000

Great to hear. I’ll watch for the next announcement.

Comment on Scalability and the Relational Model by David Fetter

David Fetter — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:49:20 +0000

Good luck with that. You’re gonna need plenty.