An Approach of Schema Versioning in Geographical Databases
Sonda Zghal
Progress in Computing Applications, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2013.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/pca/fulltext/v2n1/1.pdf
Abstract:
The managing of Database (DB) schema evolution is already a very interesting research domain. The main used mechanism for this management is the versioning. It provides a solution for handling changes in the structure of databases and it is widely used in the context of static, temporal and object oriented databases. With the growing interest in geographical databases, the managing of the schema evolution of these databases becomes a challenge. We propose, in this article, an approach for managing the schema evolution for GDB using temporal versioning. The proposed approach is based on an object oriented formalism. It presents a set of classes for versioning and others for stamping the different versions. It can resolve some problems such as data duplication, the unnecessary copying of information that does not change and the use of â€œNilâ€ values. In our approach, data is never physically converted and it is always accessed through conversion interfaces.